Jocko Podcast - 385: The Code of Combat: Moral, Ethical, and Legal Leadership and Conduct in War.

Episode Date: May 10, 2023

The Code of Combat: Moral, Ethical, and Legal Leadership and Conduct in War. Jocko Willink and Leif Babin.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is Jocko Podcast number 385 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. Also joining us tonight, Laif Babin. Good evening, Leif. Good evening. So recently had Admiral McRaven on, and we started to touch on some discussions about the ethics of war. And this is a very important thing to discuss.

This is where we must learn. and know that you have to take the high ground or the high ground will take you. That's true on the battlefield, and it is certainly true from an ethical and a moral perspective. Now, the optics of war from the outside can be absolutely terrible,

and they can give the wrong impression. And I think a good example or a good correlation of that is the stereotype of military leadership. You see the military leadership stereotype, in the movies and it's filled with these authoritarian tyrants that yell and scream and bark orders. And that kind of leadership in the military is not normal and it's not successful when it does take place. Does it ever take place? Yes, it does. There are tyrants in the military that yell and scream and bark orders, just like there's tyrants in the corporate world that yell and scream in bark orders.

But it's not normal. It's not, it's not normal. It's not successful. Leadership in the military is by people that do the right thing and listen to their troops and and Care about their people now when we talk about the ethics of war Look the same thing there's movies that present these crazy ethical situations and Show the military in a bad light but on top of that there's there's news media their social media There's books out there that can give a terrible impression of the American military and the ethics in the American military that the American military is just unjust and immoral. When the fact of the matter is that, look, that is true. There have been cases, obviously, but it is certainly not acceptable in any sense of the word.

it's not even remotely common. Americans are incredibly, incredibly ethical on the battlefield. And Americans, and we'll talk about this, go through incredible lengths to protect the civilian populace, to mitigate collateral damage, and to uphold the moral standards of our country. And like I said, we have had horrific incidents in our history like the mili massacre which was which we covered on

podcast 31 why do we cover the podcast that on the podcast well because we want people to know about it we want people to understand I want young military leaders to understand what happens when they don't take the high ground the sand creek massacre that's another one I did a podcast with Daryl Cooper on that one. Why did I do that? Because people need to understand what happens from a psychological and a peer pressure and a leadership failure. These are the kind of things that can occur.

But these type of incidents are completely atypical for America. And America has an astounding record in modern military times, especially when you consider the the vast amount of war that has been fought by America. Being said, since U.S. servicemen and women that are out there doing their job in a squared away manner doesn't get the clicks, doesn't get the views, doesn't get the lights, doesn't get the reads, it's the negative stories that are written more often. And they're written, even though oftentimes they're completely just unsubstantiated lies. But those are the headlines that get read.

Those are the books that get sold. That's the way the media works. So talking to Laif, I thought it would be a good idea to come on here and talk about what it was actually like fighting in Iraq. Talk about the actual rules of engagement. Talk about the law of armed conflict. This way, people can hear the truth. about what it was like on the ground, making decisions, leading, and how important it is for the U.S. military, the entire U.S. military, from special operations to conventional general purpose

forces, to follow the code of our country. And which code is that? Well, it's pretty straightforward. The uniform code of military justice. The law that exists within the U.S. military. And this law covers everything from drunkenness to conduct on becoming of an officer, to forgery, to robbery. And it also goes all the way to things like kidnapping and rape and murder. And the Uniform Code of Military Justice, generally speaking, is stricter than civilian law and usually delivers heavier punishments when these things take place. So you have the Code, the Uniform Code of Military Justice. You also have the code of conduct that we follow if captured by the enemy.

We covered that on the podcast with Charlie Plum, who had to live by that code. We also have our military values. You know, in the Navy and the Marine Corps, we have the values of honor, courage, and commitment. In the Army, they have the values of loyalty and duty and respect and selfless service and honor and integrity and personal courage, both physical and moral. So there are codes that we are sworn and legally have to follow. We have to follow these codes. And when you don't follow these codes, you get punished and you get punished severely. Now, knowing the moral strain that is put on men and women in combat, there's a high degree of focus on moral and ethical

in the US military and that way people have the right morals and the right ethics to act with to guide them and in case that fails during the stress of combat like I said there are legal rules of engagement that are in place and reviewed daily to ensure that servicemen and women obey the law because from a moral standpoint from an ethical standpoint we as Americans have to take the high ground or the high ground will take us so what I miss life anything yeah I think when you look at the US military I mean it just as a student of history I think that I in in my view I don't know that that there's any other military in

the history of the world that has gone to such great lengths to try to minimize collateral damage and maintain the more high ground and certainly there are incidents as you mentioned, but I think when you look at the comparative history, and particularly, you know, you see the war in Ukraine right now with things that the Russians are doing or other militaries that don't share our same sense of morality or ethics. When you see the gloves taken off, there's some horrible stuff that happens in the battlefield. And I think the U.S. military goes to tremendous links to do that. And certainly something that I'm very proud of. So let's start off by reading a lot of times people throw around rules of engagement

But I wanted to actually get the rules of engagement that you and I operated under during the battle of Ramadi And these rules were not specific to the SEAL teams they weren't specific to task unit bruiser They weren't specific to special operations these were the rules of engagement that applied to every member of coalition forces in the country of Iraq They very rarely changed. They very rarely changed. Why did they very rarely really change? Because they didn't really have to change. They are very squared away.

And like I said, a lot of people hear about rules of engagement, but when you actually read through the rules of engagement, you'll see. And a lot of people think that the rules of engagement are so constraining that the troops are put at risk. And while we could identify cases like that, most of the time, that's not a rules of engagement issue it's a leadership issue and let me just get to it here because you're going to see right out of the gate rules of engagement is the ROE card it starts off all caps nothing on this card prevents you from using necessary and proportional force to

defend yourself that's how it opens up that's the opening nothing on this card prevents you from using necessary and proportional force to defend yourself so anybody that you hear said, well, we had our hands tied. Listen, can you have your hands tied when it comes to, and I've heard cases like this, hey, we couldn't drop bombs because the rules of engagement didn't allow it. Yes, those things happen. Now, I think if you went back case by case and reviewed, many of those would be a leadership decision where leaders didn't say, oh, I am willing to take the risk in this situation to protect my guys. Therefore, I'm authorizing bombs to be dropped. That generally is a leadership issue, not a rules of engagement situation. But that being said, there has been

situations where rules of engagement have restrained and cost lives. But as you listen to these, you're going to see it's most likely a leadership issue. Then it starts off here. One, you may engage the following individuals based on their conduct. A, persons who are committing hostile acts against coalition forces, B, persons who are exhibiting hostile intent towards coalition forces. So hostile intent. Hostile intent. That means it looks like someone's going to do something bad.

A lot of times you'll hear us say, we had to wait until they were shooting at us. No. Hostile intent. they look like they're going to do something bad. And then you can engage them. That's awesome. Next one. These persons may be engaged subject to the following instructions.

A, positive identification is required prior to engagement. PID is a reasonable certainty that the proposed target is a legitimate military target. If no PID, contact your next higher commander for decision. So reasonable certainty. You have a lot of leeway in these rules. It's not overwhelming, but to say to a troop on the ground, hey, listen, you need to be reasonably certain that an individual has hostile intent and then you can kill them, that's a pretty good leeway.

That allows the shooters on the ground to make those decisions and determine whether they engage or not the next one use graduated measures of force when time and circumstances permit use the following degrees of graduated force when responding to hostile actor intent then it goes through the escalation of force one shout verbal warnings to halt two show your weapon and demonstrate the intent to use it three block access or detain four fire a warning shot five shoot to eliminate threat there's some escalation that you can use And you and I, Laif, we've been through every one of those escalations.

And sometimes you don't have time for these escalations. Sometimes you have time to go from one to four to five. Sometimes you have time to go to one to two to five. Things can escalate quickly. But there they are the recommendations of how you can escalate. And it literally says when time and circumstance permit. Doesn't say you have to go through all these five steps. It says when time and circumstance permit.

So there you go. C, do not target or strike anyone who is surrendered or who is out of combat due to sickness or wounds. Check. Straightforward. Do not target or strike hospitals, mosques, churches, shrines, schools, museums, national monuments, and other historical and cultural sites, civilian populated areas or buildings unless the enemy is using them for military purposes or if necessary for your self-defense. You can see a lot of time and effort went into these rules of engagement. These are, and you and I reviewed these many, many times on deployment to make sure that we were following them correctly.

And they are well written. And they are certainly, they're certainly squared away for not only protecting the troops, but protecting, as you can see, hospitals, mosques, churches, trines, civilian populated, all those people, all those things. cultural sites, which I remember. I went to places in Iraq where they're like, hey, this is a cultural, sensitive area. You cannot go in there. Okay, cool. We can't go in there.

Got it. There's also situations where we are getting shot at from a mosque and it's like, oh, we're sending troops in there. Got to get OSEC level approval. Cool. We got it. Let's go. So that's what happens.

They put these rules in place and these rules have a high element of decentralized command in them. Next one, do not target or strike Iraqi infrastructure. Public works, commercial communication facilities, dams, lines of communication roads, highways, tunnels, bridges, railways, economic objects, commercial storage facilities, pipelines, unless necessary. Again, they're trying to make sure the troops are protected unless necessary for self-defense or if ordered by your commander. If you must fire on these objects, fire to disable and disrupt rather than destroy. Okay. We're trying to keep the country of Iraq infrastructure intact.

always minimize incidental this is number this is letter F always minimize incidental injury loss of life and collateral damage check the use of force this is number three going to the next section the use of force including deadly force is authorized to protect the following yourself your unit and other friendly forces detainees civilians from crimes that are likely to cause death or serious bodily harms such as murder or rape and personnel or property designated by the OSC, that's the on-scene commander, when such actions are necessary to restore order and security. So these are the situations where you can kill bad guys when they are threatening your unit, other friendly forces, they're threatening detainees, they're threatening civilians,

and you can do these things. And then it says this for, in general, warning shots are authorized only when use of deadly force would be authorized in that particular situation. Now, why do they throw that in there? They throw that in there because they don't want people bit and trigger happy with their warning shots. So you're not going to say, oh, this kid is getting a little close to me. I'm taking a warning shot. They don't want that happening. So therefore, warning shots are only authorized when you're going to use deadly force. if you're not going to use deadly force, you're not going to fire warning shots. Number five, treat all civilians and their property with respect and dignity.

Do not seize civilian property, including vehicles, unless the property presents a security threat. When possible, give a receipt to the property's owner. Number six, you may detain civilians based upon a reasonable belief that the person, one, must be detained for the purposes of self-defense. Two, is interfering with coalition force mission accomplishment. Three, is on the list of person wanted for questioning arrest or detention. for is or was engaged in criminal activity or five must be detained for imperative reasons of security anyone you detain must be protected force up to including deadly force is authorized to protect detainees in your custody you must fill out a detainee apprehension card for every person you detain

number seven mnci one or mnc i i i sorry mnc i general order number one is in effect looting and taking war trophies are prohibited this is the only rule in here i don't like Like why could we not take war trophies? Can you explain this to me life? Why I could wait? Why I couldn't take why I don't have a freaking Iraqi AK-47 on my wall right now or at least four of them. This is a bummer. It is a bummer. I think when you look back to, you know, the samurai sword that, you know, our grandparents' generation, you know, had in the Pacific War or a Luger from the European battlefield off of a German officer. Those things. You know, I understand we want to control that, but we could have easily gone through the demil process to get something that we brought back from Iraq that is a reminder of who we fought against and why we fought there. And I think it's unfortunate that we couldn't follow a process to demil those weapons and put them on the wall somewhere or pass down our grid. Put together a protocol next time. Next war. give the boys the opportunity to take home some Iraqi weapons or whatever.

All right. So now you got a part that I disagree with. So we should be able to take some level of war trophies. We're going to fight. We're going to war. We want to bring back some freaking war trophies. Not, you know, nothing crazy. I mean, maybe a couple things crazy.

You're not talking about eluding here. We're talking about, hey, we detained some terrorists who were shooting us. And we want to There are RPG tube that we can demil and put on the wall and be like hey This was something that we took from an operation Like let's get that change next time around there. Jags the judge advocate general lawyers for the US military Let the troops take some guns home with them

Demil them whatever you want to do. It's fine But let's go. All right number eight and this is the last one all personnel must report any suspected violations of the law of war committed by any U.S. friendly or enemy force notify your chain of command judge advocate CID IG or chaplain these are we in effect as of 22 May 05 and these are the ones that we operated under so these rules of engagement that we operated under and we did so very strictly and very completely the reason we we were able to was number one One, if you don't follow these rules, you are putting everything at jeopardy.

Everything at jeopardy. And it's just not worth not following these rules. And number two, these rules are squared away. These rules work. These rules make sense. So, therefore, we utilized these rules. And that's the, That's the beauty of these rules.

They were effective not just in protecting the troops, but also in protecting civilian populace and also in protecting the infrastructure. They were good to go. Leif you were out there on a daily basis. The rules of engagement were good rules, absolutely. And I think, you know, I remember hearing from friends of mine that were Ford in Iraq or had been in Afghanistan,

they'd be like, you know, the rules of engagement are too restrictive. And as you said, that is a leadership problem. The rules of engagement were broad and allowed us to do our jobs while protecting the civilian populace and minimizing collateral damage. And following these rules of engagement, you made that absolutely clear for everybody in tasking a bruiser. This is a black and white thing. We will follow these rules of engagement.

And because that's the moral high ground. It's something that we were going to do because it's morally and ethically and legally the right thing to do, but also this is strategically the most important thing that we could do as well is protect the civilian populace. And one thing that really stands out to me is, you know, we, you help me see that. Like the rules of engagement give us everything we need to actually go out and protect the civilian populace, protect ourselves, and actually engage the enemy who is attacking us or other friendly coalition forces or innocent civilians, which which was a common thing that happened all the time in

Ramadi everywhere. But what really stands out to me is I think about these roles of engagement is oftentimes I think what was pretty common in the SEAL teams at the time and friends that were returning from, you know, from the Iraq war, if you ask just about any SEAL operator out there like what was their mission? What was their mission? They would say kill bad guys. Kill bad guys. And I think the thing that you helped me see in the rest of everybody in Taskin a Bruiser is that that's actually not our mission. Our mission is to secure the populace, stabilize the city of Ramadi, lower the level of violence. That's what our mission was.

And so that meant that we were going to have to kill some bad guys because there were three to five thousand enemy fighters living amongst this populace of 400,000 people in the city of Vermont at the time. The U.S. intelligence estimates were three to five thousand enemy fighters. And so we were likely going to have to kill some bad guys. But our mission was to protect the civilians and secure them. and ultimately drive the bad guys out of the city. And in the counter-surgey fight,

that was something that totally was a game changer for us in understanding that ultimately our strategic mission is to secure the civilian populace. And so every time that you breathe those rules of engagement to us and told us that summarizing all of that legal jargon down, and that's what got a little intimidating to people, is all this legal jargon. And we had the JAG, the military lawyer

coming to brief us and give dozens of PowerPoint slides with all this legal jar. What does a reasonable certainty of hostile intent actually mean? And I remember just every operation you summarizing that by saying if you have to pull the trigger,

you better make sure the person that you're killing is bad. And when you said that, it was just instantly clear to everyone that, as long as I can articulate a reasonable certainty of hostile intent, that this person was maneuvering in accordance with known enemy tactics, you know, techniques or procedures,

and that is, it gave us the support that we needed to be able to go out and engage the enemy and protect the civilian populace. And that that was our ultimate goal, was to secure the civilians, build relationships with them, show them that we were there to actually help them. And they wanted us there, as we met with them and talked to them to help them, drive out this insurgency that was ruling over them.

When we got there in 2006, just this brutal reign of terror and fear that it lived under, those three to five thousand enemy fighters. I mean, just, I've often said to people that those jihadi insurgents that we are fighting in Ramadi, I think that they are as evil an enemy as the US has ever faced in our long history. And I'm certainly well aware,

of some of the horrors of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. And I think any of those individuals out there, just the torture and rape and murder and horrible stuff that they were doing, you just, you clearly, you made it absolutely clear to us that these rules of engagement will be followed. This is black and white. We are here to help the 400,000 people that are living here, and we're here to liberate them from the evils of this insurgency.

Yeah, case in point. When we got there, there had just been a civilian that had been skinned alive and by the insurgents. When we got there, there had just been a family who had been, the father had, the insurgents thought he was cooperating with the civilian populace and they beheaded the guy and put his head on the, like, on the front lawn of the family. these people were just absolutely just heinous in their actions so yes I that now when we got

there was a couple of things that I had that was pretty lucky number one as odd as this may sound I was an English major in college and when I was an English major in college I had to go look at Shakespeare and I had there be words that I didn't know what they meant And instead of me, if you would, before I was an English major, if I saw Shakespeare, I didn't make any sense, whatever, it sucks. When I went to college and I had to read literature and I had to analyze it and had to figure out what it meant, I learned how to use a dictionary.

I learned how to be okay with saying, oh, I don't know what that word means or I don't understand this phrase. Let me break it down. Let me parse it out. Let me break down these individual words and find out their meanings. And so for me, if I would have read that rules of engagement, which we just read in 1996 when I was 25 years old I would have been like But having gone to college and studied English

I understood those rules of engagement and I was able to Articulate and explain to the troops what they actually meant so I think I was very lucky in that respect I was also very lucky in respect that I had just got back from Iraq and the first deployment that I'd in Iraq was a very active deployment. We were lucky enough to have a very high-op tempo. We were conducting mission after mission after mission. I got a lot of experience. I was very lucky to be able to do that.

And this might sound strange, but we did a lot of direct action missions, meaning we did a lot of the kind of the classic seal mission of there's a bad guy in this building in this part of the city. We go out kicking his door, grab the guy, capture him, bring him back to base interrogate him go out and get another guy like that's what we did classic seal mission especially for the war on terror it's classic seal mission and I did so much of that that without a better way of saying this I kind of got my fill and when you do that many missions you're definitely stoked on it but then you know my aperture opened up to where I started looking and saying well what

else could we do what else could we bring to the battlefield and by the time we got to Ramadi yes, I definitely, I was looking to conduct those type of direct action missions, but I also thought to myself, how else can we help? So that was already in my mind. And look, I know you and Stoner and the rest of the boys wanted to conduct some direct action missions, no doubt. And we definitely planned to and did. But I mean, it's like, you know, you really want to have chocolate chip cookies, You know? Well, I had to eat in a bunch of chocolate chip cookies the previous deployment. A lot of them. And so I was like, hey, dude, there's steak over here. There's like good burgers over here. There's, there's, you know, it's not all it's cracked up to be. We don't have to just keep eating these chocolate chip cookies. Let's get, let's have them. Let's definitely have them. But we can do some other things. So I, those are some things that I was lucky about. Lucky that I studied English. I hate to say it. It's embarrassing a little bit. Lucky that I studied English. Lucky that I had done that I had a, that I had a, that I had a, that I had a, high off tempo in my previous deployment. And I, I didn't have any, man, for lack of a better word, I didn't have anything to prove like I needed to do a bunch of these missions so I could be like,

look what I did. And I had a lot of experience. I had a lot of experience planning and conducting operations. So I was very lucky from that respect. Well, first of all, I think you studying English and you've always had a, you know, I've said this before. I think if you have a superpower, it's, it's taking some complex things and simplifying it down to a point where the whole team could understand it. And the frontline troops out there executing can understand it. And it's, I think that's something that you did a tremendous job of because the rules of engagement require decentralized command. And so not only for you to actually understand what those word means, what those words actually mean, all that legal jargon, what does it actually mean?

But you helped me and everybody in the task unit down to the frontline troopers understand that so that they can actually go out and perform their job and not have to worry about, hey, can I take this shot without getting sent to prison or let me ask permission up three levels of the chanted command. And then by that time, the bad guy that was shooting it at you is gone and is going to go out killing other people. Yeah. But real quick, props to our JAG.

We had a judge advocate general who was working at SEAL Team 3. And the reason I have to bring this up is because sometime when I was in college, I wouldn't understand something that this writer had written. And I'd look up the words and I still couldn't make sense of it. So I might talk to our JAG and say, hey, what does this actually mean right here? What does this actually mean? Put this in some other words for me so I understand it or explain what they're trying to get across here. And then he would do that. And so we had a very squared away JAG officer who was my professor when it comes to the ROE and what it means.

So that was also beneficial. And that enabled you to trust your troops to go out and execute the mission knowing that these are the rules. We have to follow the rules. It's black and white. And that's how we do things. You know, the other thing, too, your perspective is, you know, you have the strategic vision of what was actually driving impact. and what wasn't, you know, in Iraq. And that experience, I think, played a massive part in it.

I remember, as I reported my first SEAL team, some Echo and I, some of our good friends were just coming back from their first Iraq deployment, SEAL Team 5. And I remember the thing that was being said about those guys was they saw more combat than any SEAL unit since Vietnam, which was a true statement at the time. They'd done a ton of operations. And then you took over from those guys and did even more operations and continued that over the course of six full months and they'd only gotten just a few months in, I think,

of doing those kind of capture kill raids. And so you had a ton of experience coming back from that. That's all the missions that we wanted to do. But you were able to, for me and Seth Stone, the Delta Platoon commander and for the rest of task in it, to really look at the counterinsurgency manual, you know, look at the situation on the ground and say, hey, enemy attacks are actually up 300% here. We've been doing capture kill rates for a long time. Is that actually having the impact that we needed to and make that adjustment and really focus on that our mission isn't to kill or capture bad guys and gather intelligence? It's actually to secure those populace. And that's how we're going to win this, you know, this counter-surgency fighter. I think you just,

you really opened our mind up. And I think that was based on all the experience that you had and the lessons that you brought back from your platoon commander to her with Steel Team 7. And I think that was integral to our success in tasking a bruiser to really think strategically about about what is our mission here and how can we make the most impact. Yeah, definitely very lucky in that respect. I was also lucky because I'd been an e-dog. I've been an enlisted seal. And so I had done a bunch of deployments as an enlisted seal.

And you know what? There was no war going on. There's no war going on when I was doing a bunch of deployments. I did a couple like contingency operations. We like the, I locked and loaded my weapon maybe three or four times doing shipboardings or things like that. I guess I'd done some, you know,

a bunch of shipboarding as well, you know, so you're, I guess if you're lock and loading your weapon, I always felt like I was doing something real, right? So I had lock and I guess it was more than four or five times when I talk about all those VBSS operations. But I'd done a bunch of operations. you know that were real even before I got to Iraq on my first deployment and again were they were they cool no we're looking back of course they were lame but that's

what that's what that's what we're doing at the time I had taught a bunch of stuff in training sell at seal team one which that is when I feel like you really learn stuff well is when you start to teach it you know do you go you go teach jiu jitza you go teach an arm lock your arm lock's gonna get better when you start teaching a heel hook your heel hook is going to get better because you have to show the details you have to figure out why it works you have to show these little nuanced parts of the moves and so I was doing that as an E5 at SEAL team one and when I was in SEAL team one in training cell all was a single dude and guess what we were doing we I would go on every trip like nowadays

you know someone will be like a land warfare instructor back in those days if you were willing you go on that land warfare trip you go on that CQC trip you go on that combat swimmer run that thing we were we taught everything so I got a bunch of experience of very lucky to have that. The other way, so it gave me a very good tactical sense. You know, and I had great people that taught me this stuff. So very, very lucky. But there, I mean, there's, there's a difference between training in real world operations, right? And there was a ton of people who'd been in training for a long time, and there's some great seals out there. And I think you were in a position as a platoon commander to, at the forefront of conducting these operations, just the efficiency at which you

guys were able to do that and created the standard operating procedures for the entire SEAL teams, including the sensitive site exploitation, which is gathering intelligence. You guys actually created that in your platoon on that deployment. So I think those, you know, you were coming back from that deployment and taken over as our tasking commander with more experience than anybody else out there. And I think that gave us, we were able to harness that to help us really set our our tasking it up for success and focus on where we could have the most impact strategically. Remember when the Army dude came to us in Ramadi and taught us SSE sensitive exploitation? And I was like, hey, dude, like, it wasn't actually me.

It was my assistant platoon commander. I was like, hey, we need a squared away to do this. And we wrote about this in the dichotomy leadership. We need a square way to do way to make this happen where this is not working. We need to get it more streamlined and more more disciplined. And he said, okay, and he created it. And then we started doing it and we started telling other units about it. And so then in Ramadi, three years later, the army shows up and like, hey, here's how

you're going to do this. I was like, wait. And I know we invented it. Now listen, we didn't 100% invent it because my assistant platoon commander reached out to people that he knew in law enforcement, people that he knew in federal law enforcement and said, hey, how do you guys like search a target? And they gave him feedback and he took that and kind of fitted it to our situation. I looked at it.

It was like, yeah, that makes sense. And then we rehearsed it and made some more modifications. But yeah, that is an interesting point that we were able to bring. But even my first deployment, like the first time we got shot out, I was like, oh, cool. I wasn't like, oh, cool, we're getting shot out. Here's what we do. Like, I wasn't freaked out. Why?

Because I'd been through so much training. And it's like we tell that story about Seth. This is the first gunfight that Seth ever got into Romadi where he was like making decisions, making calls, flanking the enemy. And this, you know, army majors like, hey, man, you might. must have a lot of urban combat experience and he's like no this is my first firefight why because he'd been through awesome training so I had done a lot of that the other thing that was very lucky so that that gave me a good tactical level picture but then luckily I had I was the admiral's aid

and no one's no one likes to say they were lucky to be the admiral's aide but and I certainly didn't want to go and it was my commanding officer at till team seven that was like my final mission is to make you the Admiral's aide. And it was a smart move for him. And I, and I look back and thank him for it. It cursed him at the time. But working for Admiral McGuire, what I got to see was I got to see how much pressure the SEAL leadership was under. I got to see when we messed up like there was some drama. There was some negative, negative impacts. We had some guys from SEAL Team 5 They went out. They took pictures and those pictures got uploaded to some photograph site.

Shutter flies. Yeah, or something. And they got seen. They got caught by the press and the press published them. And it was a bad look. It didn't make the SEAL teams look good. There was the SEAL Team 7, which I was at SEAL Team 7. There was a prisoner abuse scenario that unfolded.

I saw how that impacted the, not just the guys. Those guys were my friends that got in. trouble some of my guys some of my friends got in trouble from from other platoons and you know so I got to see and think wow this is terrible if if you do something like prisoner abuse and the prisoner abuse that I'm talking about by the way is extremely minor minor to the point that it's less than a you know a normal seal platoon new guy hazing that we used to get that's that's the kind of abuse that I'm talking about I'm not talking about

Torturing people. I'm not talking about bamboo shoots under the fingernails. I'm talking about Non-professional treatment of prisoners is the best way I could I guess I could describe it So these guys got in trouble My platoon my sister platoon or other platoons at still team seven actually got in trouble guys got court martial guys got letters of reprimand for their behavior And I got to see that but not only did I get to see what it did to the guys I saw what it did to my boss the Admiral I saw the scrutiny the he was coming under. I saw him having phone calls and video conferences with the Secretary of the

Navy, with the CNO. You think the, you think the SEAL teams needs the CNO calling, asking questions about what the hell's going on with this prisoner abuse stuff? No. So I saw how that happened, what happened to our community when guys did things that they shouldn't have done. Then I got to see what happened, we all got to see this one, but I got to see it even closer, was the Abu Ghraib scandal. So the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. Again, here you have these soldiers. They're not acting professionally. Look, were they torturing people? In my assessment, no, they're not. Were they unprofessional? Yes, they were. Were they electrocuting people? No, they weren't. Were they putting bamboo shoots under fingernails? No. Were they waterboarding people? No. They weren't doing

any of that they were doing 19 year old idiot stuff that's what they were doing and you know what it was a massive negative impact on the war it was a massive negative impact on America it was a it was a massive negative impact on our image and our image counts you can when you go into a country and your image is bad the local populace doesn't trust you and you have to earn that and did Al Jazeera absolutely, and did the insurgents capitalize on this? Yes, they did. That Abu Ghraib scandal completely fueled the insurgency for three years. You helped me see that too, because I remember when that happened, you know, look, when we got, you know, there was all this discussion about enhanced interrogation procedures, and you mentioned waterboarding.

like, well, when we, you know, waterboarding was training when we went through, right? So only when it's used on the worst humans on the planet like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, those, those self-professed mastermind of 9-11, did it become this big deal. And so it, Abu Ghraib to me was kind of like, like you said, there wasn't torture going on. There was, there was some degrading photos. Yeah, that's a good word degrading. And it was certainly unprofessional. And I was like, what's the big deal?

People need to just get over this stuff. they're making this giant deal of it. You actually helped me see. And I remember the conversation you had with me and Seth about this of like, hey, this is a huge deal. We just handed a giant victory to the insurgency by these knuckleheads doing stupid stuff. And these photos are now being used to recruit the next generation of al-Qaeda fighters all over the world. And that was an eye-oper for me because my attitude is kind of like the attitude of, I think, probably most seals or military personnel that I knew at the time was like, hey, they're overblowing this thing.

It's not that big of a deal. They actually torture people. You know, these are some photos. The insurgents actually torture people. The insurgents actually saw off the head of American citizens. And you say you're lucky that I was there. I'm lucky that I got put into that position working for the admiral. And I got to sit.

I mean, think about it. I was, before we were in a task unit together, I was sitting in a room with two, three, three, four star admirals and generals. I was sitting in the room with the the in the Pentagon and hearing how these things were impacting us. Otherwise I would have been the same as you like dude who cares screw these guys. This is no big deal, but no when you see it from a strategic perspective it has a it has a huge negative impact on top of that I'd seen that in 2005 there was a sergeant had gone to trial and he'd gone to trial for shooting an Iraqi and and killing him. That's not why he went to jail. That's not why he went to jail. He went to jail because he tried to cover it up. So it was a justified shot that they had actually gone in and cleared a building.

I don't remember the details of it right now. But I do remember this. They had confiscated a pistol from that house and taken the pistol that they had confiscated and planted it on the guy. And this is why this sergeant got in trouble. for doing that. And he had shot and killed basically, and please don't quote me on this,

it was basically like they cleared the house, they found the pistol, they're in there doing post-sensitive site exploitation, and this guy makes a lunge for one of the American soldiers and this guy shot him. Okay, totally within the rules of engagement. We just went through the rules of engagement. Is it hostile intent when you lunge and grab it

the weapon of an American soldier? Hell yes it is you get shot you die But instead of just calling it and saying hey this is what happened Instead they took the pistol that they had confiscated from this guy so this guy's obviously He's not no threat they like shot around into the wall and then put the pistol on his hand and That's why they got in trouble They didn't get in trouble for killing that guy he he tried to attack an American soldier at close range So they shot him that's perfectly legal

but they tried to cover it up. I saw that thing unfold behind the scenes. And so I had a, coming out of being the Admiral's aide, I had a much better understanding of the professionalism that was required and the legal concerns that were happening and how they impacted everything. They impacted our community of seals negatively, but they also impacted.

America and they impacted this strategic possibilities of winning this war so I was very lucky to have had these experiences and again and I've had Admiral McGuire on the podcast and you know no one wants no seal wants that job no seal wants that job but man did I learn a lot from seeing these things take place I That being said, when we, and not that being said, those are the things that when we arrived in Ramadi, it was like, okay, our mission, you talked about what our mission was. I'll tell you, our actually, you know, you said our mission was to secure the populace. The way we were supposed to do that, and from the siege of SOTIF, which is the combined joint special operations task force, the, the quote that I remember, because I had to say it so many times, was to train and fight company and platoon-sized elements of Iraqi soldiers. What does that mean?

It means you take Iraqi soldiers. They didn't say special operation soldiers. It was just Iraqi soldiers, platoon and company-sized elements. This is between 40 and 150 Iraqi soldiers, train them and then fight them, not fight against them, but take and fight them with them,

alongside them. That was what our mission was. And where I think the benefit of my previous deployments and seeing a little bit more of the big picture, And I think really that big picture, you know, once you see one big picture, you start looking from the big picture more often. And I think that's one of the things that led me to say, hey, we can do DAs and we're going to do DAs. We're going to go capture kill bad guys, 100%. We're going to go do targeted raids.

But I think seeing the bigger picture made me think that we could do more. We could provide more support and we could do more than just the DAs that we had done. the past. Yeah, I think that that strategic perspective that you brought to the table was was hugely eye-opening for me and and for everyone in Tasking a Bruiser. I think help us focus our mission because we had trained to do those direct action missions, those targeted raids or capture kill missions. This was, hey, get intelligence, go out and grab a bad guy, you know, interrogate them, go out and grab another bad guy. And when you looked at, you know, you helped me see that, hey, if we continue to only do that, enemy attacks are up 300%.

The, the, and this was al-Qaeda and Iraq battle space, two-thirds of the city of Hermody, this city of 400,000 people was totally controlled by al-Qaeda and Iraq, which is the precursor to ISIS, and then, and their insurgent allies. And so as we looked at that, it was very clear that U.S. forces weren't winning here. And so we had to actually really refocus efforts to help win strategically. And that meant, again, securing the populace, stabilizing the city, and ultimately lower the level of violence. And so, you know, you were the first person I ever knew who had read the counterinsurgency manual. What counterinsurgency meant to me before that was, oh, that means non-kinetic operations, which is building, you know, drilling wells or helping

people build a building, you know, like a civil affairs type operation. construction project, you know, winning hearts and mind stuff. And yet you helped us really see the counterinsurgency fight. This is our part is that we can go into areas that nobody else can get into and help secure the populace in those areas

and drive the insurgents out. Yeah, and we will dig some wells and we will build some buildings. But in order to do that, you have to set the conditions. And setting the conditions means you need to lower the level of violence and how do you do that? You kill bad guys. The idea

that we weren't winning. That's a very important concept that not many people wanted to actually make. It's a statement that not a lot of people actually make. Look, a lot of people, at that time 2005, 2006, there was definitely people in the U.S. government that were saying, we're not winning, we're losing, this is never going to end.

It's a quagmire. That was certainly happening. But amongst military people, you didn't hear a lot of, hey, we're not winning. And if you're not saying you're not winning, That's implying that you are winning. What I actually heard of was worse than that, though, because it was, well, we might not be winning, but, you know, we're not losing.

And I would hear that. And you're at what does that actually mean? Yeah. So then you're in denial about where the situation actually is. So then you can't take corrective action to fix the problem so that you are winning. Yep. Part of this, and we saw this just unfold in Afghanistan, part of this is the way we fight wars right now. is we fight it by replacements.

Now, listen, in Vietnam, they replaced individuals, meaning you have a platoon, Leif Babens, in the army, and he's got a platoon of soldiers, and every two or three days, he gets two or three new soldiers, and two or three of his soldiers leave. And so you're just getting these replacements. Well, we realize that that was bad,

because now we don't have continuity within, we don't know each other. And they also end up with guys that are like, hey, I'm just trying to survive for my year. Then I'm out of here. I don't care what happens anybody else. So then they realized that was bad. So they started taking whole units and sending them over.

The problem with that is, you know, if I'm the commanding officer of a battalion and I do my one year deployment in the Army or my six-month deployment in the Marine Corps and my boss says, hey, how did it go for you? What am I going to say? I'm going to say we won. We did this. We proved this. We moved in this neighborhood. We took over this thing. Our Iraqi troops got better.

I want to say that we are winning. And so when you show up Laif and I say, we've got 80% of the populace secured. And you take over for me. What are you going to tell the next boss? We are 90% secured. What is the next guy going to say? We're 100% secured.

And meanwhile, we're still 30% secured. So this happened where we have people that are just saying, hey, we're winning. Let's keep doing the same thing over and over again. certainly the 1-1 AD didn't have that attitude. Their attitude with now General McFarland, Colonel McFarland at the time was,

we need to do something different. And I went through this on some podcast before of how that unfolded, but yes, reading the counterinsurgency manual, which I had a draft copy of found on the internet, a draft copy of it. I don't even know what triggered me to read it. I'm sure I'm sure I read something or saw something.

You know, I had watched the movie about Algiers. What's that movie called? Do you know what I'm talking about? Battle of Battle for Algiers. You know what movie I'm talking about? Yeah, I don't remember the name of the movie then. Yeah, and it's an insurgency. And you can see that they're losing.

The French are losing. And I just remember thinking, there's got to be, this is what's happening. I made that connection that this is what's happening here. And France lost, and we're going to lose if we keep this up. So we, you know, the key component, and this is what I had to tell our chain of command, is secure the populace. Secure the populace. Well, how do you secure the populace?

You go out and you have to work with the populace. You have to get amongst the populace. Later on, I think it was General Petraeus that said we can't win by drive-by counterinsurgency, meaning you can't just drive by a neighborhood and think, now they're secure. You've got to go in there. You've got to live there. You've got to set up shop. That's what the one, 1-1AD wanted to do, which meant that they were going to be out.

and exposing themselves to danger, going out into enemy-controlled neighborhoods and exposing themselves, doing census operations, going and meeting the local populace, going trying to do these civil affairs projects that we're talking about, trying to lower the level of violence. How do you lower the level of violence?

You go out there and you find the bad guys and you get rid of them. So when the Army and the Marine Corps had this idea of going into these enemy-controlled neighborhoods, setting up overwatches, how do we help them? Well, one thing I knew what we could do is set up overwatch positions, which I think on my I think on my first deployment to Iraq, we might have done four overwatches, four sniper overwatches from fixed positions. And but they seem like it was a good idea. And I didn't even carry it through workup in our workup.

I don't think we did one sniper overwatch. I don't think we did one urban sniper overwatch, did we? Not one. Not one, but I kind of remembered, we had done this before. I think we could do this again. I think this will be really effective. Also, you know, who did,

you know who was really into snipers? Colonel David Hackworth. So I'm like, this is effective, man. We can pull this off. And for some reason, again, luck. We had 13 snipers in TASC unit bruiser, which is a high number. BTF Tony, I think, was pretty critical in that,

and obviously Chris Kyle in that regard. I'm just making sure that we had, that we had. trained snipers because they knew how effective that could be. And so I think getting guys ready were, there was some pre-planning that went into that to set us up for success. And the other thing was going to Army and Marine Corps Memorial Services. And we went to one of those almost immediately when we got there and we continued to go to those memorial services.

and if you go to one of those services and you see the broken hearts of these soldiers that losing their friends and if you don't want to do everything in your power to go and help them you're not a you're not a man you're not an American going to the first one we went to I had a overwhelming drive to see what we could do to help these guys that were out there patrolling in the day going out there getting IED getting shot up and what can we do to help there was no you know people talk about oh how do you draw how do you draw enemy fire you don't need to enroll body how do you draw enemy fire be all be alive be alive and be a coalition forces and you're going to draw enemy fire that's what's going to happen so getting our snipers out there immediately and and you know in which we

did and I know BTF Tony one of the most beautiful pieces of timing was BTF Tony taking a sniper team out to wear up in Firecracker, which was an area of Ramadi that was very bad where the Marines had just had a mass casualty IED and BTF Tony takes a team up there and kills an IED in place or two. And I happened to be in the brigade tactical operation center as that report. was coming in. And it was like for the first time there was some kind of proactive offense happening. And you could feel it in the room. And I could see it in the eyes of Colonel Gronsky. You know, he looked at me as, is that your guys? Yes, sir. That's our guys.

And he immediately said to me, I need you over in Eastern Ramadi. Like that's how impactful was. It was so impactful that within 30 seconds, he was asking me, could we put snipers? in Eastern Ramadi. And I was like, yes, sir, we can. So when you say mashed casually too, I mean, just to help everyone understand what that means, we're talking

about everyone in the vehicle is wiped out. The IED goes off under the vehicle, kills everyone in the vehicle. And I remember talking to Lima Company 3-8 Marines, awesome group of warriors that we were so forced to be able to work with, learned a ton of our tactics from, and their

patrol techniques, their snipers, and how they set up overwatch positions. But I remember talking about that. And the turret gunner from that ID was ejected from the vehicle. And it was, he was thrown like several hundred feet. And they couldn't,

they couldn't find his body for hours. They were looking for it. And it was just so hard. It was one of the first things that happened when we got on the ground. I'm hearing these stories. And just, yeah, to your point,

like these, just seeing this awesome group of warriors, those Marines, the soldiers that were out there, whatever we could do to help those guys and try to mitigate the extreme risk that they were taking every single day we were certainly going to do.

And one of those things was these sniper overwatch positions, setting those up. Talk us through, just give us like generically, because I want to get into how you, how you, how we, how are snipers, what you're seeing, what it's

like, and then we'll talk about some of those rules of engagement, how they came into play. But just talk us through like a normal sort of, what's the word, generic sniper overwatch? Yeah, I think just one to set the stage about that is we were going into areas that that had no coalition forces presence previously and ever, or certainly not for years, at least. And when we're going to these areas, I mean, the turnover I got from the previous Seal of Petitian commander was don't go into these neighborhoods because you're all going to get

killed and nobody can even come recover your body to get you out. And so this was an extremely dangerous neighborhood that was totally in control of by the insurgents. Most of these areas, they had so many IEDs or roadside bombs planted in the roads that you couldn't drive in there. You couldn't even get into the areas. So, you know, one thing that we realized we could do is how could we support the soldiers and Marines? How could we support this counter-surgency fight? How could we support this mission of securing the populace, stabilizing the city, lower level of violence, was taken a small group of, you know, heavily armed seals.

And oftentimes we had Iraqi and U.S. soldiers with us. We certainly had, you know, Marines with us on many occasions as well, like Dave Burke and his Air Naval Gunfire Liaison Company. But we would patrol into these areas. Real quick, small group, just for people out there, I know you think sniper team, you think small group, you think two people. Tell me, you know, small group in this case is between maybe seven or eight on the low end, a low, low end.

Minimum force was eight seals on our operations. Usually it was, it was anywhere from, you know, 12 to 14 guys on the minimum side. And particularly when you're going into South Central Omani, where you know 100 enemy fighters can attack your position and overrun and kill everybody. This was not a four-man sneaky sniper team. This was a lot of times it was a 30 or 40-man element that's going to go in and lock down an entire three-story apartment building.

And you're carrying belt-fed machine guns and shoulder-fired rockets because we knew that we had to carry all the firepower we would need in order to defend ourselves from these attacks that we were absolutely going to come our way. And we knew that the soldiers and Marines would get to us or try to get to us if they could, but oftentimes they may not be able to just with the IED threat. And so we had to be able to protect ourselves. So we would patrol in undercover of darkness.

We would park our vehicles and foot patrol in because that was even at nighttime, I mean, the surgeons were just waiting to blow you up in your vehicles. Yeah, just to clarify, when you say park your vehicles, we'd park the vehicles in a forward operating base or a combat outpost. or the government center, like somewhere, it wasn't like we were just parking them in the street and going on patrols, just to make sure everybody knows. No, this was going to the nearest forward operating base

that we could as close as we could get. You know, sometimes that was across the canal or the river, and then we would foot patrol in under cover of darkness when we had the advantage of night vision and usually things were a little bit quieter. But we're going in areas where there was, I mean, the enemy had complete free reign and total freedom of movement, as we call in the military,

to do whatever they wanted to do. There was no one in there to stop them from that. And so we patrol undercover darkness. You know, usually that was several kilometers into enemy territory, set up in a position. If we could set up, if we could set up, you know, two or three mutually supporting overwatched positions with interlocking fields of fire,

that's certainly what we tried to do at every chance that we could do. We'd set up in, get on the rooftops or get into the windows of buildings where we had some long access looks down roads, establish a position there, and particularly in support of U.S. Army and marine operations where oftentimes we do this as the lead element on the ground for a giant operation of a thousand U.S. troops and dozens of tanks and, you know, engineering vehicles. So we'd go in there, set up these positions, wait till the sun came up with a call, first called the prayer would kick off in the morning, kind of just before the sun would come up. The city would start to come alive. You'd see insurgents moving around with weapons,

maneuvering to attack nearby friendly patrols, or setting up for attacks, loading mortars into vehicles, and our snipers would engage the threats in accordance of the rules of engagement. You could see, you could observe hostile acts happening. And or a reasonable certain of hostile tennis, we saw them loading mortar tubes and mortgers into the back of a truck. Obviously, that's well within the rules of engaging. We know they're about to go and attack coalition forces. And so we'd engage them and they would figure out where we were. And they figured out where we were every time.

And they would start to engage us. And so then the tactic that we learned from three Marine sniper teams was instead of being the sneaky sniper mission, that would, transition from a sniper hide to overt fighting position. And so if you were in a large building, you had to have 30 or 40 guys in there with machine guns, with shoulder fired rockets, so that you could actually secure the buildings and defend yourself. But the thing that we really learned from them was, unless we had an urgent surgical casualty, we were hold in our position. That was an overt fighting position. So now as they started to attack us, the worst thing that we could do was extract from the building because then all of a sudden, and I remember a conversation

with our commanding officer was asking me a question, hey, why aren't you leaving once you're compromised? I was like, well, sir, we're behind concrete walls. This is exactly what the surgeons want us there. They want to ambush us out on the street. And so what we would try to do is hold our position throughout the day and wait until it was nightfall until we could extract more safely under cover of darkness with night vision, you know, et cetera. it was that became the overt fighting position that we would utilize and they would attack us, they'd shoot our position, they'd hammer us with mortars, RPG rockets, machine guns, hitting us from multiple directions, and we would engage those enemy fighters as they maneuvered on us.

And what's hard also for people to understand is, I think, and it's certainly conversations with our commanding officer, his staff and others, was oftentimes the threat of friendly fire was so significant, particularly when we were out there beyond the Ford line of advance and we had U.S. forces that were moving into that position. Well, they're getting shot at by enemy fighters. We would overtly mark our position. We'd throw a giant blaze orange signal panel over the side of the building and let everybody know where we were because the threat of getting shot at by an Apache gunship overhead with their 30 millimeter cannon or or tanks. And, you know, their tanks and Bradley finding vehicles, soldiers or Marines in the street, the threat of getting engaged

by U.S. forces was so high that we had to, we had to let everybody know where we were, and we would take the insurgents shooting at us all day long over, you know, a 120-millimeter main gun round from a U.S. Abrams tank. So that was something that we often did. And there were times when we ran up the American flag as well to let people know where we were. And, and, and, and, and, And that was when we felt like we were in a good, defendable position. And the enemy wants to come attack us, bring it on. This is an overt fighting position. And the times when I was a part of that was, that was my call to raise that flag up.

It got a lot of attention, certainly. And we would get reports from the soldiers and Marines to say, hey, the insurgents are coming. We're gathering intelligence that they know where you're at. And we'd be like, bring it on. Let's go. We're right where we want to be. But oftentimes that was when we had friendly patrols out there. And we got friendly patrols with Iraqi forces that are out there trying to secure the populace and show a presence there.

And so I would much rather have those insurgents attack our defendable fighting position in an overwatch position with the blaze orange signal panel or the American flag flying to attack us rather than those patrols that were on the street. Yeah, we were going to win. We're going to win those 100% of the time. Like, oh, you got 30 moves. They're going to fight 40 guys in a concrete building with sniper weapons. And like, they're going to lose. And they did. They did.

A couple things that I was thinking about was shout out to the Marine Corps CERC boats because we didn't always drive in. Sometimes we went on those boats and those guys were freaking awesome. Outstanding support that we got from those guys. So instead of having to take a Humvee to a fob, go in on those boats. They were, they were awesome. What an awesome crew of Marines there. And we didn't have any of our typical special boat teams nearby.

They weren't there. They could help us to support us. But these Marines were awesome. And they took us in on those surf boats, which is kind of a kind of a rear, but very heavily armed. They were putting it out there. I'm hanging it out there on, you know, a canal that's maybe, you know, 40, 50, 60 yards wide and moving, you know, moving through at nighttime undercover darkness where you know if you get ambush, man, you're screwed.

You're in the, there's nowhere to hide, nowhere to run. And they hung it out there for us, dropped us off quietly and enabled us to patrol into those areas of the city without getting blown up. Yeah, vehicles. Frogman activity right there. The thing about being out at night, the enemy knew that we had night vision, obviously. They knew that we had lasers and they knew they couldn't fight us at night. I would say the number of enemy that we killed was probably 2% during the day.

Or sorry, during the night, 2%. I think you killed a guy. I mean, there's a couple of kills that were at night, that were kind of chance contacts. But the enemy knew that we owned the night, and so they didn't come out at night. The local populace had no reason to be out at night, so they didn't come out at night. But the local populace came out during the day, and that's when the insurgents would come out as well. That's why discretion was so important. And not just this civilian.

So you had civilians out there. You have Iraqi soldiers out there. You have Americans out there. The amount of discipline that the snipers had to have and the machine gunners had to have was incredible. And I remember, so you have Iraqi soldiers out there. I remember the first time, you know, a guy came running around the corner with an RPG in his hand and RPG rounds on his back. and for my entire life, to me, RPG meant enemy. Kill this guy.

And he goes running by and then I see like it's a bunch of Iraqi soldiers. So the PID is even harder because you got Iraqi soldiers out there that are carrying K-47s, just like the insurgents. And on top of all this, the insurgents had captured American uniforms. They had matching uniforms with the Iraqi soldiers because the Iraqi soldiers were wearing kind of mix match, Camys. They had helmets.

The insurgents had helmets. The insurgents had body armor. The insurgents had AK-47s. So they looked like the Iraqi soldiers. They had RPGs. So that idea of hostile intent had to be hammered home because if you just shoot a guy with an AK-47, you might have just killed an Iraqi soldier.

If you just shoot a guy with an RPG, you might have just killed an Iraqi soldier. If you just shoot a person that you see walking down the street, you might have just killed a civilian. So the discretion had to be absolutely massive. And we learned that the hard way. Because as I wrote about in extreme ownership, the first chapter, we had one of our guys kill an Iraqi soldier. And I go through the circumstances in the book of how, specifically happened, but I had to make sure,

therefore we had to make sure that that didn't happen again. So PID positive identification was front and center of every single person's mind, front and center of every person's mind. So this is why it was such a critical component. And you talked about like the, there were some, there were some, even inside the seal community, some people are like,

these guys in T.U. Brews are just rolling out on these daytime presence patrols. We didn't do a lot of presence patrols. Of actual presence patrols, I think you knew the number. It was 14. We did 14. So out of hundreds of operations, we probably did a couple hundred, you know, missions. We did 14 presence patrols in the day. They were dangerous as hell.

That's why we didn't do a bunch of them. They were very dangerous. We never, we got in some contacts. We never took a casualty. But the reason was it wasn't a great. job for us we did it sometimes but what we did do was combat advising of the Iraqi clearance forces that were on the ground in the daytime and we would put seals with those Iraqi forces so we might have four or five seals on the ground with the

clearance operation so you got a clearance operation that might have 20 or 50 or 100 Iraqi soldiers we put seals with them the seals with them are doing actual combat advising they're doing commanding control for them there's probably 20 or 30 American soldiers so there's de-confliction going on as well and what they're doing is they're going house to house doing clearance meeting the locals getting building relationships with the people like you said Laif there's 400,000 civilians there and if there wasn't 400,000 there was 300,000 so this place is crawling with locals crawling with locals And so taking that partner force into the local neighborhoods to meet, to find out what's happening, to find out to gather intelligence, to let them know that we were coming, to let them know that we were here.

And the enemy would attack, yes. And that's why this one-two punch of having a clearance operation happening with Iraqi soldiers, American soldiers, maybe some seals in the C2 element on the ground, and then these sniper overwatch teams, sometimes bounding sniper overwatch teams. That's another thing that we did, but sometimes in fixed positions, engaging targets when these gun fights would break out. And the other thing, oh, go ahead. I was just going to say real quick about the one is that you're 100% right. I mean, this as the day would, you know, we're sitting an Overwatch position as daylight, you know, breaks. And the city comes a lot. There's people out there just trying to live their lives.

And you'd see the shepherd boys bringing his herd of sheep down to the river to, you know, water the sheep. and you'd see people working on cars and and vehicles driving around and and you know there wasn't there wasn't a lot of commerce then because they certainly uh but there was there was these people lived in a war zone uh but yeah there were there were people out there and so you had to the snipers had to be extremely scrutinizing and and uh positive identification was absolutely key in every aspect um The other thing about those patrols was, you know, people are like, it's crazy. You guys are out there patrolling to contact. Well, there was a real counterinsurgency reason for that.

And now, as you said, like we can't do drive-by counterinsurgency, as General Petraeus said later. You actually have to engage with the populace. Our mission was to train and fight platoon and company size units of Iraqi soldiers. And that was getting those Iraqi soldiers out there to show them that they could actually show the populace that we're here was that was absolutely in our mission. I think we it was dangerous but we did the best we could

to mitigate the risk we can control. We set sniper overwatches in place in just about every case that we have patrols going on or we had bounding overwatches as you said of you know covering moving for each other one unit's covering while the other's patrolling and oftentimes what most of our

sniper overwatches were was covering for the military transition teams, the U.S. soldiers, and Marines that were out there with the Iraqi soldiers, as well as the regular conventional U.S. Army and Marine units that were engaging out there engaging with the populace meeting with them. When I say engaging, that sounds like they're out there knocking on doors, talking to people saying, hey, where can we help? You know, where are the insurgents? What can we do to help you? We're here to help and protect you with the Iraqi soldiers,

with them. And obviously, that was a huge piece of their counter-surgency. And we did that in order to support that effort, trying to mitigate the risks that we can control in that effort. Yeah, the census operations, the hearts and minds campaign, totally critical. And luckily, when the shooting starts, the women, the children, the innocent men, they hide. They're not walking around. This isn't like you're sitting there saying, oh, well, is this person bad or good? This person's running across the street with an AK-47.

They're getting shot by US forces. That's what's happening. They're not a woman walking down the street during a gunfight. Oh, I wonder if she's good or bad. That's not happening. It's not happening. Just like you don't have a woman walking down the street during a gunfight. An innocent woman's not walking down the street during gunfight.

That was actually one of the most eerie things. And I love the one of the pictures that we used. I don't know what Shadper, we used it for in extreme ownership. But it's a picture of task unit bruiser seals to the left. right side of a street, kind of a, you know, going down this narrow street, a walls on both sides, and you're looking down the street empty. It's a city street, and it's totally empty. And you knew it was, it was amazing how the locals know what's coming. They see, you know, they can see down the side streets, they get the word, all of a sudden, you'd be on patrol, there's people

moving around. There's, there's a family, there's kids checking a soccer ball, there's cars in the street, and all of a sudden it's just empty. And you know, okay, attacks coming, set your stopwatch, you know what's coming. Now, now all of a sudden the hair on the back of your necks is standing out because you know that you're about to get attacked. So the locals would disappear, which is also why, you know, you read the rules of engagement and in that escalation of force, if you've got someone who's maneuvering against you and you're pointing a weapon at them and shouting at them to stay back and you've got an interpreter telling them in Arabic to stay back, well, they're going to move. I mean, an innocent person is going to run. They're going to,

they're going to like, oh, man, someone's pointing a gun at me. I need to need to back off, which they did. It was no, no problem. If they were to venture out. Um, and then obviously, if they continued towards you, if it became a threatening situation, you could utilize a warning shot to let them know, like, hey, you need to back off. And they would, so the idea, like, we, we were able to, uh, to use those rules of engagement to absolutely minimize, you know, any kind of collateral damage because they were, uh, the people would disappear, uh, number one, before an attack happen in most cases. And in other cases, if you've got someone that's, it's a question, you don't see a weapon, but you're not sure why they're maneuvering towards you, you would use that escalation.

And look, if someone's going to continue toward your position after they have been told to back off and that they have a weapon pointed at them, and then they get closer and they get a warning shot fired in the street 20 feet in front of them, I mean, they're bad. There's no question that they're bad if they're they're maneuvering in your position. And so that that that was the rules of engagement gave us everything that we needed to do to protect innocent civilians in that regard and protect ourselves. Yeah. And it was also easy to you know like I've heard people like oh you can't just shoot people with cell phones right. Well there was no cell phones in in Ramadi. There was no there was no self the al-Qaeda had blown up all the cell towers they didn't want any cell phones to be there to be

used by for tracking so they blew up all the cell all the cell towers so there's no cell phones so when you saw someone communicating they're communicating on a on a on a high frequency or a very high frequency radio a Motorola radio and guess what they were doing they weren't ordering pizza they were coordinating attacks so that's a totally different thing and again you don't see innocent women out communicating on a Motorola radio on a handheld radio because they they're innocent. No, there's military-aged male with radios, with radio out there passing intelligence and coordinating attacks. That's what's happening. So this idea that there's like, oh, well, oh, it's hard to tell if someone's on a cell phone if they're what they're talking about. There's no cell phones.

It's easy to tell what they're talking about. It was a huge problem. But for, for U.S. targeting purposes, I mean, our enemies often understand our tactics better than we do. And obviously they're making adjustments that's one of the things they did there was blow up all the cell tower so there's no network and we can't use signal intelligence you know to our advantage so that was a well-documented problem and and something that we've been briefed on before we even arrived in Ramadi I think that happened in 2005 you know well before we got there in 2006 yeah you know you mentioned earlier you know the my rules of engagement brief you know my brief brief which was hey if you have to pull a trigger make sure the

person you're killing is bad. The for me, and this is a leadership principle, what I need to do is keep my guys out of trouble. That's what I need to do. That's what I told you, you need to do. You keep your guys out of trouble. And by the way, this doesn't only apply to combat. This applies to we're on liberty in Louisville, Kentucky, or Reno, Nevada, or Lake Tahoe or San Diego.

Our job as leaders is to prevent our guys from. getting in trouble it's not cover up when they get in trouble it's actually prevent them from getting in trouble we'll get to cover ups because cover ups don't work there's no such thing as a cover-up it's just you're just getting I already talked about it with with that case that I that I mentioned when I was the Admiral's aid that happened like if you're covering things up you're making it worse for everybody and we'll get to that but our job as leaders is to make sure your guys don't get in trouble how do you do that if my guys get in trouble get an

related incident, guess what? That's my fault. It's actually my fault. What did I do? Why didn't I explain to them what they need to watch out for? Why didn't I keep them busy enough that they weren't out doing something stupid? Why didn't I make sure they have a designated driver or a designated brain, as we used to call it? A designated brain meaning, hey, it's not just the person that's going to drive.

It's the person that's going to think. So we got nine knuckleheads going out and get drunk. We got a 10th person there that's a designated brain that makes sure nobody does. anything stupid that's our job so it's our fault if we allow people to get into trouble that means if we don't explain the rules of engagement if we don't explain and Admiral McRaven had a good way of putting this if we don't draw the red lines that you're not allowed to cross very clearly so everyone understands them we're allowing our guys to get in trouble that's what's gonna happen the

same thing we talk about since day one being taking care of your people isn't saying hey do it You want and I'll cover for you. That's not how you take care of your people. You want to take care of your people. You explain to them what the rules are and what will happen if they break the rules. That's how you take care of your people. You make sure they understand the rules of engagement.

And then on top of that, they have to understand why this is happening. They have to, and this is what I would explain. I would explain, hey, this city is filled with civilians. This city is filled with civilians. filled with civilians with normal good Iraqi civilians it's filled with doctors and teachers and imams and the day that we go out and we kill a doctor or a teacher and a mom out in the city of vermadi first of all we've done irreparable damage to the war effort we are not going to be able to take that back this is a problem this is going to get used by al-Qaeda it's going to get

used by the insurgents it's going to be used for their propaganda that's what they're going to show. So we've taken a huge negative strategic step the day we go out and kill an innocent person. Also, we're going to get shut down. That's what will happen. We go out and kill a civilian, some imam or some doctor or some teacher. We're going to get shut down. We're not going to do any more operations. Not one of our military army, Marine Corps battalion commanders would have allowed that to fly, ever. So we would have gotten shutdown. The deployment would be pretty much be over and we would have been destroying what we were actually fighting to protect. So when we're in a leadership position, it's our job to make sure that the team understands

all those consequences, not to mention you're going to go to prison, not to mention that part, but all those consequences. They have to understand all those consequences. That's our job as leaders. Yeah, I mean, in that environment, too, like there was, you weren't getting away with anything. You know, I mean, there was, this is a city with 400,000 people. There's a, there's a governor. There's a, you know, there's infrastructure places.

There's people out on the street. There was embedded reporters that were out there on operations. I mean, there was a CNN camera crew with a number of the Marine and Army units that we worked with. I remember that specifically, Stars and Stripes reporters. It was, that stuff was always out there. In fact, we got busted for patches because. which we wrote about in Dachotomy Leadership, I couldn't even hide the patches from you

because there was a combat cameraman that took some photos and the photos got back for approval out there snapping photos on operations. So there's always people out there, always folks with us, every operation we did had an interpreter with us, a civilian, you know, usually either an Iraqi citizen

or maybe an American citizen who had grown up in Iraq, These were people that were with us on every single operation. This was their homeland. They loved these people. They were part of that on every operation. So, I mean, that was something that we were, that it was just the reality of how we were operating.

This wasn't just some, like, deep in the hinterland of Afghanistan somewhere where no one's going to know about this. There's no roads in there or anything like that. This was a city with hundreds of thousands of people and constant scrutiny on every single operation that we did. I wanted to just talk about what you just said, which I think is a really powerful, a powerful point. And, you know, oftentimes as leaders, we talk about what does it really mean to take care of you people? What does that mean? And, you know, as you said, it's, it is oftentimes the trap is that people, they want to be liked, hey, I'm going to, you know,

I'm going to, hey, you know, yeah, you got in a fight, you got in a bar fight, or hey, you did something you shouldn't have done on Liberty, you know, before we even deployed. Like, hey, I want to be liked as a leader, so I'm not going to actually hold the line. I'm not going to hold a standard. I got your back. I'm going to cover up for something that maybe you shouldn't have done. And you made it very clear from the beginning. I think it's one of the most important things that you've taught me is this my job as a leader.

My job is the platoon commander, the officer in charge, is as much as anything else out there, not just planning and executing a tactical mission out there, but is to take care of my people. by making sure that they're doing the right things, that they understand the rules of engagement, that they're doing things, not only from a perspective of, you know, to make sure that everything they're doing is legal and moral and ethical, but also to make sure that they're not going to harm our strategic mission

or do something that's going to give our al-Qaeda, you know, in Iraq terrorist enemies propaganda to use against us or to undermine us with the local civilian populace, or to do something that they might regret for the rest of their lives. And you really help me understand that what taking care of my people met is is looking out for their long-term good and the long-term good of the mission. And I think for me, it's a hard thing. But as I've often said, you help me see that my job, that was my job as a leader.

And what I, you know, you helped me, you gave me the confidence to know that instead of just, instead of just, hey, I probably should be doing this. I probably should be making sure that the platoon shows up early and gets their training done. And, you know, if somebody gets in trouble on liberty, instead of covering up for that or saying, hey, we got your back, man, saying, hey, man, you're doing the enemy's job for him. If you get in trouble and you get arrested, you're giving the SEAL team's a bad name, you're not going to deploy with us. That doesn't help us.

That doesn't help our mission. And you've got to think about that. And so you gave me the confidence to know that, like, I actually have to, to be, that's a leader that I have to be. And if I'm not doing those things, if I'm not looking out for the long term good of my people, making sure that they're doing everything, legal and moral and ethical and following the rules of engagement, doing not just what they think is right, but actually what's legal. If they're not doing those things, then I'm actually failing as a leader and I'm failing the team. And so that gave me the confidence to know that this is

absolutely black and white. And that is my job as a leader is to keep my people from doing things that are going to harm them, put them in jeopardy, you know, that are illegal, immoral, unethical, but also things that they might regret for the rest of their life, things that might affect us and harm our ability to build relationships with the local populace and go out and secure them, stabilize the city, lower level of violence. And that was my job as a leader. I think one of the things that probably I Utilized or maybe maybe connected the dots for you and by the way a lot of this stuff When I talk about this stuff and it sounds might sound like oh I was this big thinker and I had everything figured out

That's not true actually I look back and I feel once again lucky because I feel like I was just ahead of the curve I feel like I just was far enough I was mature enough I was old enough I had been through enough I had been through enough I'd learned enough. I'd had the right mentors at the right times. I'd seen enough that I was just ahead of the curve of being like, hey, this is our job, this is what we need to do. And one of the dots to connect is,

look, if you're in the SEAL teams, your job and the number one priority is the mission. Look, we take care of our troops, but what our focus is, what we do, look, we take care of the troops, but our action, the actions that we take should all be driving towards one thing and that is effectively executing our mission.

And that, as I've said before, is the Trump card. It's the Trump card in any argument you're gonna have with a team guy. When that team guy says, well, I wanna go out tonight or I wanna do this dumb thing or I wanna go make this happen. When you say back to them, hey, do you not wanna be able to go close with

and destroy the enemy on the battlefield? There's no answer. There's no answer. The only answer is yes, that's what I want to do. Is this going to help you do that? If you get in trouble tonight for being drunk, if you get in a fight, if you have some kind of an issue with your freaking credit card and your credit's bad and you lose your security clearance, all those things, they're all bad.

And, hey, I mean, when we were in Ramadi, I said, hey, anybody that fucks this up and you start to do things that are stupid, if you do something that's stupid that's going to interfere with our opportunity to kill the enemy, to do our mission, you. you're going home immediately. I don't want you here. You will not be here. And so when you talk about the confidence, the confidence is just you figuring out,

oh, there's no arguing with that. There's no seal that says, well, actually, I'd rather, you know, take the risk and get in trouble than fight the enemy. There's no, and if you do have a seal like that, kick them out of your platoon immediately. Kick them out. Kick them out of the teams.

If you have somebody that prioritizes, anything other than executing the mission, then they're not in the right job. So I think connecting those dots was very important. Now, you mentioned like, oh, they had a governor there. So just to take that a little bit further, there was a government center in downtown Ramadi. There was a bureaucracy.

It was small, but they had a bureaucracy. They had a governor. I forget his name, but they had a governor. And this governor that was running the city of Ramadi met with the brigade commander two or three or four times a week, had sit down meetings to say, hey, one of your tanks drove over this bridge and now the cars can't go over it. You need to fix it. And the brigade commander say, yes, sir, we'll take care of it. The governor of Ramadi would say, hey, there was a, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, Bradley fighting vehicle that rolled through the front gate of one of my people. You need to get out there and repair that guy. And the brigade commander would say, yes, sir, we will take care of it. Battalion commander,

would they get task? Go take care of that gate. When a civilian got wounded or got killed, well, first of all, if a civilian got wounded, they would immediately Kazavak, that person trying to help. But if there was a civilian that got killed,

because this is war. And civilians did get killed in the Battle of Ramadi. It was a small number, but they did get killed. When that happened, The governor would meet with the brigade commander. They would sit down. They would give reparations to the family.

We would apologize as coalition forces. And we would handle that. So when civilians got killed, it was a huge deal. There was times, actually a lot of times, a lot of times. There was times, probably three or four times, that there was big protests where civilians had been killed. and the local populace came and protested, hey, you know, coalition forces killed one of our, you know, one of our kids, one of our people, one of our,

and then we had to go figure out what's going on. Again, I'm saying we, the brigade would have to then go figure out what had happened and sit down with the family that had lost one of their family members and pay reparations. This was a huge, huge deal. So to think that you could be out there just killing people was just, It's just completely insane thought. It's a completely insane thought. It could not happen.

Every civilian casualty was a catastrophe. It was a problem that got raised through the entire government of Ramadi and brought to the coalition forces and was solved. It was investigated. It was reparations were paid. That's what happened every single time. So it's important to think about that as you start to think about. about the job that you and I had, which was making sure that our guys understood that clearly

so that they could make the right decisions. And what that all boiled down to is make sure that if you pull the trigger, you better freaking make sure that the person you're killing is bad. Otherwise, everything else is gonna fall apart. And you made that absolutely clear to us. And I think that, you know, that,

I remember one particular time when, I don't know if it was, soldiers or Marines, but there had been, there was a protest at the front gate over a civilian catching that had happened on an operation that this is one that we hadn't been a part of, but I remember hearing about it. You talked to me about it, like this is what's going to happen if we're not following the rules of engagement. And we were to a point where I remember you and I actually had a disagreement over the use of explosive breaching charges based on the the impact of like, hey, if there's a family on the other side of that door, we could possibly

injure people, let's don't use an explosive breach. And the thinking of SEALS at the time was, no, you have to use an explosive breaching charge. And we, I remember you and I had a big debate about that. Like, no, actually use manual tools. Let's try not to do that. That shouldn't be our standard operating procedure so that we can mitigate any potential risk of collateral damage that might result.

There was some pushback in the platoons on that. But when you explained to me why that was important and what would happen if we accidentally injured a kid or, you know, a family member on the other side of the door, then it made total sense. Okay, we need to back off using explosive breaching charges. We're going to use manual tools so that we can put the security of the populace. We're willing to take some more risk to ourselves in order to protect the civilian populace. to make sure that we don't cause, you know, unwarranted collateral damage, and that we don't give the enemy some, you know,

recruiting tool to go out and say, hey, look, the, look at what the Americans are doing, they're out killing innocent civilians. Luckily for me, I'd already been through that. Those arguments that you were bringing to me, I had already been through them on my last deployment. I had already been through the whole breaching thing. I already been through the civilian casualties.

Oh, and how bad those were for the war effort. So when the implication, comes from Laf that I'm being a freaking wimp, right? Because that's what it is. Like, what do you mean? We can't explicitly breach. You're being a wimp, Jocko. Not only that, but now you're putting my guys at higher risk

because if we don't breach the door and there's a bad guy behind the door and we're sitting there with a sledgehammer trying to open it, you're going to get my guys killed. Luckily for me, I'd already had all these discussions before. And, hey, well, how many times have you taken rounds through the door on your explosive breaching charges? You haven't.

How many times are you? So we start having these discussions. How many times have you been engaged inside the target building? I know you're getting engaged a lot outside of how many times you so we're having these discussions We're having discussions that these are not actually black and white That hey if you're hitting a target where you are deeming it as the commander on the ground That is so high risk that you feel the need to use explosive breaching charge do it Do it but let that be a decision that you're making And if you look at that door and you say, you know what?

I don't think we need to do. I don't think we need an explosive breaching charge right now. Don't use one. And the risk versus reward. We're going to up the risk to our troops. Yes. Yes. Why?

Because we're trying to accomplish the mission. And the mission is to secure the populace. And if you're out there hurting and killing the populace. With explosive breaching charges, you're failing the mission. And go, I mean, I'm. I'm sure you want to talk about that one story where you made the call. You know, you had a breacher that was like, hey, we're going to blow this door, and you're assessing the situation. You see what the situation is, and you said no breach.

That was a tough situation where my breacher wanted to put an explosive charge on the door. And it probably made sense of him to be able to do that. And I was, because I was detached, I was back from the door and I was observing the situation. I saw a man's pair of sandals, which is the common. footwear they wear, man's pair of sandals, woman's pair of sandals, kids, kids, kids, kids. Like, there was three or four pairs of kid sandals next to this door. And it was kind of a small room that we're about to go into. And I just, I told my lead breacher who was a fantastic seal and an incredible guy.

I was like, I was like, hey, let's put let's let's manually breach that. Get the sledge up here. And he wasn't too happy with me for that. He was like, what are you talking about? And we almost, we kind of got in a back and forth there. And I kind of had to put my foot down that. to like let's sledge the door. So we we sledge the door, got in the room, we're able to capture the target that we were after. And, and of course there was a family around the other side of the

door. So it was the right call to be made there. But it was something that because we'd had that discussion about, about we've got to be, we have to be careful about not injuring civilians on this stuff. And so taking a step back to be wary of that and thinking about that. And certainly it was a higher risk. This was a high level al-Qaeda in Iraq bad guy. We had, I think we pulled, They were there were he had beheading videos on DVD. This was a really bad guy that were rolling after that he was directly linked to some some horrible, you know, torturing civilians and murdering people and in a number of attacks. And so it was a risky move, but it was the right call based on the situation that we wanted to minimize collateral damage.

Yeah, also because we'd already cleared like other buildings. It wasn't like this was the initial breach. Like it was it was it was that that's what it painted. And, you know, when you debrief me on it, I was like, yeah, good call. But that, there were also, you did give me the leeway to make decisions when I did need a breach on things. And there was another situation where we were, we were after a particular guy and we, the AC130 gunship over set head observes him jumping from one building to the next building and the next

building. The rooftops were just a few feet apart. So we was able to jump from rooftop to rooftop. And so we're chasing this guy. I think we've four or five. buildings down and and so we know where he is we we leave the target building we're in we patrol down to hit that building we know this guy's expecting us to be there we don't have the element of surprise so we use an explosive breach on that

you know on that door and when we did we blasted the door and we blew all the windows out of the you know the front of the building and as we it was it was a call that I made based on like okay this is a high threat guy he may absolutely have a weapon or a suicide vest on him and we were going to expose to be breached the charge when we went into the room we look at he was another room deep lined up against the wall was the the family and then what was interesting about that was they stood up and immediately pointed out the guy that was like he's not one of us and through our interpreter and we talked to this family I was like we're very sorry for the damage to your door the damage to your your windows

And through the interpreter, I'm telling them, we gave them, we carried cert funds with us, which were, I don't remember what the acronym stands for, but it was, it was a, it was a fund that we had available. I would carry $500 on it. It was like the standard cert fund. I would carry, which went a long way in the city of Vermont, certainly to pay for the damage that was done. And the, the head of the household, the man was said, I don't need your money. Thank you for getting this bad guy. out of our neighborhood. I think he'd tortured or murdered some of their relatives and friends, and they were just happy for us to get this guy out of there, which was, that was kind of the first, you know, the change amongst the civilian populace that had lived under that reign of terror and fear under these insurgents of, hey, we're actually happy to see you. We appreciate the word that you're doing. And we did sit in a civil affairs team out there, and I think they repaired their door and fixed their windows or at least gave them some money, you know, to do that. But you gave me the leeway to make the call.

But knowing that when we were going to make the call to try to minimize the collateral damage, that could possibly happen at every opportunity. And that was my job as the platoon commander, was to be detached and observe the situations and make a decision based on what I was seeing and to try to mitigate the risk that I could to my team, but to also mitigate the risk to the civilians. And so we prioritize that over the wrist of our own team. Yeah.

And the reason I was able to give you and Seth a bunch of leeway is because you knew and understood that the decisions, that the actions that your platoon took under your command were your actions and your decisions. And you had 100% ownership of them. You weren't going to be able to come back and tell me, Oh, the breacher put a charge on the door and blew the door and, you know, wounded a civilian. It was my breacher's fault.

That wasn't happening. You were going to make decisions. Every decision that got made was your decision. It's your platoon. And by the way, when my commanding officer came to me, I wouldn't say, well, Laef's Breacher did this. It's Laf's fault or the breacher's fault. No, it's on me. I didn't explain this clearly enough.

So the ownership up and down the chain of command is what allows there to be that kind of discretionary leeway. And you had to have it with your snipers. I mean, you can't, Seth had to have it with his snipers to say, yeah, if you know the person is doing something bad, if you know they're a bad person, they have hostile intent, then you take the shot. You don't have to call me. You don't have to call Seth. You take the shot. that is because everyone is taking ownership of what is going on. And it goes direct, like when you, I mean, we started this in Workup.

You know, when your freaking point man got lost and you came back to me and said, oh yeah, sorry, my point man got lost. I didn't go talk to your point man. I talked to you. I'd say, well, did you go through the route with him? Did you know what the landmarks were looking for? Will you keep in pace? Because this is your platoon.

It's not your point man's platoon. When your machine gunner, you know, was outside of his field shooting outside his field of fire. I wasn't like, hey, machine gunner, let me talk to you. No, Leif, what is going on with your machine gunner? Why didn't you explain the fields of fire? You're in charge. Same thing with Stoner. Stoner has his freaking medic doing something that he shouldn't be doing.

Do I say, oh, medic come and talk to me? No. Hey, Seth, why is your medic doing this right now? Why did they take that action? So I definitely, you know, things can get a little bit, I mean, this can happen in any organization, but certainly in the SEAL teams. The SEAL teams are tactically run by our enlisted leadership. Our platoon chiefs run the platoon. Our LPO's run the platoon.

Our senior enlisted SEAs inside of a troop run the troop. They're going to make things happen. And it's pretty easy for an officer to start thinking, well, you know, the chief made that call. Maybe it's the chief's fault. It's pretty easy for that to happen. And I had many of these conversations when I was running training, when I was running trade at. Many of these conversations, you know, the OIC would tell me, well, you know, the platoon chief wanted to do this. So that's why we did it.

Oh. So it's the platoon chief. You want to go talk to the platoon chief? Who's the platoon chief's fault? The platoon chief overall in charge? And I know when I used to teach that junior officer training course, I would say, you know who's going to court martial on that decision? It's not the platoon chief because it's your freaking platoon.

You're the one that's going to answer. So making sure that people understand that when you're in charge, it's your decision. No matter who makes that decision inside the platoon or inside the team or inside the organization or inside the company or inside the department. When you're in charge of that department, when you're in charge of that division, that's your call. And you're going to have to own it. And that understanding for you, for Seth, that's what allowed there to be leeway. That's what happens.

That's decentralized command. You have to have trust in order to get there. I have to make sure that people understand the why. and that's what allows us to to handle those types of situations. Now, we talk about our rules of engagement, but the enemy, they understood our rules of engagement as well. And they certainly adapted because they have no rules of engagement, which is a huge advantage for them. They don't care about civilian casualties. They don't care about destroying the infrastructure.

They don't care if they have blue-on-blues. don't in fact they have suicide bombers they don't care about any of that so they understood our rules of engagement and they did their best to utilize our rules of engagement against us is tough to deal with it was horrible to deal with and I think I think that's you know they were they were they came up with the most diabolical way they could to try to kill us you know in any way that they could and they were incredibly adaptive very innovative always looking to like probe for weaknesses and and take advantage of where they saw weaknesses. You know, this,

this is, they were hiding amongst the civilian populace. So you've got, you've got an individual out there, they're wearing a dish dacha, which is kind of the Arabic robe and, you know, might have a kofia wrapped around their face, which is like the Arabic, Arabic headdress. They're shooting at us with, you know, a hundred round belt of PKC machine gun, which is a Russian belt-fent machine gun and then and then they'd drop that weapon and now they're walking on the street as a civilian so it was um they would constantly try to prey upon the the mercies and the moral high ground and the rules of engagement of our our u.s. forces as well so um i remember on my first appointment when there was a a vb-id or a car bomb that was driven into a u.s. convoy and

they used an elderly man to do that and the the turret gunner was was reluctant to engage this elderly man who was driving up. He thought maybe it was just a problem. Next to you know, maybe he just didn't know what was going on. Next to you know, he blows himself up and kills a bunch of Americans. So they would always do that kind of stuff. They'd use spotters who weren't armed. You know, they'd send them out there looking for enemy territory.

You'd have somebody who's looking around the corner of the building. And you know that he's talking to his buddy with an RPG that's standing probably six feet to his right behind the corner of the of the building but you can't actually see that guy so so we're not gonna we're not gonna engage that the the spotter who's not armed but we know that that we could you know we could use the escalation of force to say warn him to either get away utilize a warning shot in order to do that and but it was it was they would they would have the I mean the guys lined up and ready to go and sometimes when we had multiple

sniper overwatch positions. We got to see that where they're going to attack one overwatch position and I would see we're in another overwatch position. We could see from a different angle. They didn't realize that we were in one position. They knew what the other position was and we'd see the behind the scenes there as the spotters actually looking out in the street and he's talking to a guy. There's two insurgents with belt fed machine guns and two more with RPG rockets that are ready to launch and you could you could witness that and see it happening. Yeah, and by the way, that's hostile intent.

Total hostile intent. That spotters getting killed. You know, you, you, that's, that's, we killed spotters that were doing exactly that. And I remember the first time, because we, and when we'll get into this, but we had to send up shooter statements of who is engaged and why are they engaged. And I remember the, uh, the siege of SOTIF asking about, hey, this is an unarmed person. Uh, that's just observing and giving directions. And I said, no, they're coordinating. I remember writing this email up the chain of command.

When a person is, you know, giving, passing, coordinating instructions to active military-aged males that are armed, they are not just gathering intelligence. They are coordinating attacks and they are going to die. And I got the reply back, Roger, because it was absolutely warranted. That's what the enemy was doing. They were, those spotters were out there coordinating attacks. and in order to disrupt those attacks, they needed to die. And so that was a,

that's the way we had to operate. And it wasn't, but just real quick, it wasn't like, it wasn't like, someone was out bird watching. You wouldn't see someone, it didn't look casual.

Like people might think, oh, you might get mixed up. Oh, how do you know? It's obvious. It's so obvious. They're, they're, it's hostile intent,

hostile act, you can see it. Any seven-year-old kid could watch and go, oh, that person's doing something bad. And then you take a trained military person that's been observing this enemy TTP for the last one month, two months, three months, they're going to get it every time. Yeah, and to paint the picture

for what that looks like, you're patrolling down the street. All of a sudden, you just, I would never observe like the civilians leaving. All of a sudden it would just click in my mind like, hey, they're gone. As we said before, all of a sudden, street's empty. And then you got to, then you got somebody around the corner who's like, you know, the peeking around the corner and looking and watching you. And you know you're about to eat an

RPG rocket or have some 100 rounds of, you know, machine gun bursts come in your direction any, any moment. And it was obvious that that was hostile. We have every, every justification for reasonable, certainly possible intent. In the Overwatch positions, though, they often use, they, they would send out like a teenage kid. And this was something where they, they would send out a teenage kid to like knock on the doors, knock on the gates, because sometimes they would know we were in there somewhere, you know, some enemy fighters got shot and killed. They're shooting back, where they're not exactly sure where we are, but they kind of narrowed it down to a group of buildings on this block, and they send a 12, 13 year old kid who's not unarmed, like knocking on

the gates. And you know exactly what they're doing. And, you know, they're trying to figure out where you are. But in that case, we, nobody, we weren't going to just kill some kid. What we did was we either ignore them, not answer the gate, or in some cases, we had a, we'd have the interpreter go out there covering for them with like the man of the house, talk to him briefly. Or in some case, we detained the kid. Obviously, they're going to know exactly where we were, you know, at that point. But we didn't engage that kid. We knew that they were, that kid was being used as probably through no fault of his own. and they're taking and putting this teenager at risk,

you know, to try to find out where we were so they could kill us and try to pray upon, you know, our mercies. But we follow the rules of engagement in that regard, and we would, those kids didn't get engaged. We knew that we were in a position that we were about to get attacked and we would defend that position, but we would sometimes attain that kid or sometimes just ignore them or sometimes have the, you know, the senior family of the,

never talked to them and tried to try to dissuade them in some way. But you knew that attack was coming. It was something that we just had to be, had to be prepared for. But we followed the rules of engagement. Yeah. And there's, and I remember explaining this, there's nothing that Al-Qaeda wants more than for us to kill a kid. There's nothing that they want more for their propaganda than for us to kill a woman,

us to kill a kid, us to kill an a mom. us to kill in a mom, us to kill a doctor, that's what they want. They couldn't make a doctor walk out there and do that. They couldn't make it a mom do that, but they could force a 12-year-old or a 13-year-old kid to walk down the street knocking on all the doors. They were hoping and praying that we would shoot them. And then they have their big propaganda victory. So why are we making, how can we make these decisions? It's because we're thinking about what's going on. We're thinking from a strategic perspective. We also know, like you said, I mean,

the enemy doesn't know right now. They're going to know in about 20 minutes. They're going to figure it out. So it's not like you're going to, it's not like you're taking some tactical, some huge tactical loss where you're going to be in an extremely compromised position now that you've been compromised by this kid.

That's not happening. So there's no value. There's no value at all. And again, thinking about the strategic value of letting that kid live is infinitely more important than the tactical value of them not knowing we're there for another 10 minutes.

But a matter of fact, you engage the kids, now they know exactly where you are. So there's a lose-lose situation. No tactical advantage for doing that whatsoever. And that's exactly what they want us to do 100%. And we knew that. And we weren't going to do that.

But more importantly, that's not something anybody wants to carry on their conscience. Obviously, the immorality of that, that's just not. who the guys that we serve with are. And so that's not something that we would have done and didn't do because, again, my job as the platoon commander out there was to make sure that people weren't doing something

that was illegal, immoral, unethical, or get them in trouble, or something that they would carry on their conscience for the rest of their lives. So that's something that I took very seriously. And it's, even though our enemies, tried to pray upon that. That's something that we were not going to give them.

Also thinking about the fact that they, the enemy literally used human shields and utilized these like these 12 year olds that we're talking about walking solo down the street, the enemy also literally used, and I'll literally get to used all the time, but actually used children as human shields. Yeah, we saw that. number of times and we're talking like an insurgent fighter carrying an RPG rocket over their shoulder who's holding a child, you know, a little 10 year old girl in front of him as a human shield. And again, that's, they want us to shoot them. They want us to shoot them so they can use that as

as propaganda. As I said, I feel like these insurgents were as evil as any enemy that that America's ever faced in our long military history. And it's because of stuff like that. It's just just horrible, horrible stuff. What was awesome about that, though, is that, you know, if you're a, if you're, you know, a Army private or a Marine private man in a machine gun, 50 Cal, and you engage in a surgeon like that, you're very likely to hit the, you know, the big human shield, the 10-year-old girl that's being used as a human shield. Our SEAL snipers were able to regularly engage insurgents, headshot on those insurgents,

eliminate the threat without actually injuring the kids. And they did that a number of times. And it was something that I know the Army and Marines are very appreciative of. And I was impressed with the skill and discipline of our SEAL snipers who were scrutinizing those shots and able to, able to save the lives of kids that these evil insurgents are utilizing as human shields

as they're running across the street, you know, and just, you know, do no farther on this kid is just being dragged along. you know in a horror knowing that they're probably gonna get shot and killed and a seal sniper would be able to eliminate the insurgent and that kid's able to go run home with their family and not be killed yeah props and and salute to the the snipers and the NSW which is the the Navy Special Warfare sniper school and just the training that they got those guys got put through and how just outstanding they were and how how how how focused they were on

that craft to be able to execute shots like that. It's just awesome. So we had, I also want to point out that although there was 400,000 civilians there, and although there was civilians, you know, in the populace, there was also an incredible amount of legitimate targets. And when we arrived, as you pointed out, the enemy wasn't used to Americans being in these neighborhoods. They weren't used to it at all. They weren't used to Americans, being concealed in overwatch positions. They weren't used to Americans being able to take accurate long range shots down long access roads.

It was a target rich environment. And the enemy killed an action, the numbers of enemy killed an action were big, were high right out of the gate. And what that did is immediately we got a lot of eyes on what we were doing, a lot of examination, a lot of inspection and even some scrutiny in the beginning, which is fine. We got a lot of scrutiny on what we were doing because the number of enemy killed so quickly hadn't been that we really hadn't had that those high numbers since Vietnam. Since Vietnam that there was just killing going on on a daily basis, enemy being killed,

reports coming up. So the chain of command dug in and and, and looked at what we were doing. They started to, they started to say, hey, what's going on? And our attitude was, come and see. That's just, and this is something that I actually learned from the Army was come and investigate,

come and look at what we're doing, come and see what we're doing, come on out here. You wanna send the, you know, whoever from the chain of command, you wanna send the office office, you wanna send the CMC, you wanna send anybody that you wanna come out, send come out, you wanna send out our JAG, send him on out. We'll bring them out so they can actually see what's going on.

And those, then they did. So they come out. This is exactly what we're doing. And then they put some things on us that were, seemed a little bit rigid, but if you thought about them, they actually made sense. Things like Sworn shooter statements.

Yeah, and that was something that I got frustrated with initially because we were getting some scrutiny. Who, Laif got frustrated? Angry Laif. Well, and when you think about it from my perspective, If I know that my snipers are out there, as I just said, using incredible judgment, incredible discipline, minimizing collateral damage to as much as they possibly can in every situation. And yet protecting, you know, this civilian. And a typical sniper overwatch, you might have, it's a city.

You might have three or 400 people walk in front of your sniper scope. And they're engaging an enemy fighter who's carrying an AK-47 and another guy with an RPG rocket that's clearly either attacking. us or maneuvering to attack a nearby friendly patrol. And so we would, we would write that up and in these sworn shooter statements and the JAG, the military lawyer at the siege of sort of headquarters, which was two levels up, the channing command for us, and they were like 80 miles away to the north, so they're not with us. They don't know what's going on there. They would sometimes ask some questions. And I got very defensive about it. that. And just an example, I might have a statement that said, you know, two military age males

carrying AK-47s were engaged, resulting in two enemy killed in action. And so the JAG would ask some questions of like, hey, why did you engage these guys? It's like, well, they're carrying AKs and we're attacking people, obviously. But under the rules, there's no banks in Iraq. So each of, each of the household was allowed to have one weapon per, I think the senior male per household. So one weapon per senior male per household. And that's their home defense because they have all their valuables under their bed or, you know, tucked in a corner somewhere or any money that they had. There's no no banks again.

So so the jag is simply saying, well, how do you know that these weren't people just out for a stroll? And so I got real defensive to say, well, how dare your question? you my guys, you're trying to send them to prison for doing our job. It was my initial reaction. And then as I talked to Jocko, Jocko was like, yeah, they're not here with us right now. They're 80 miles away. They're not on the ground with us, not on the battlefield. So how are they supposed to actually know what's going on?

It's a legitimate question. If they're allowed to have an AQ 47, how do you know it's not somebody? So I realized that I needed to explain to the Jack why we were doing that with those shooter statements. And so what I did was simply realized, okay, If I'm a JAG and I'm sitting in sandbagged headquarters and I've never been on a combat operation and I don't really actually know what's going on that I actually need to explain it.

So I, I, we, we made sure that those shooter statements captured what actually happened, which was, you know, with a 22 power magnification night force scope from 250 yards, a SEAL sniper observed, two military-age males carrying AK-47s in an apparent attack in accordance with known enemy tactics, techniques, and procedures, on a nearby friendly U.S. Marine and Iraqi patrol, determine a reasonable certainty of hostile intent,

and engaged with two rounds of 300 wind mag resulting in two enemy killed in action. Because that's actually what happened. But as we described that to the JAG was like, awesome, good shot, awesome. Keep doing what you're doing. But that scrutiny was real. And it's certainly we felt the pressure of that initially. And as we helped the pressure of that initially, and as we helped the Jags see why we're making decisions we're making and explain to them the situation

that was going on. The question of scrutiny, they understood what we were doing. They understood why we're doing it. They just, they simply wanted to make sure that we were following the rules of engagement. And so you helped me realize that that they were actually there to help us, not our enemy trying to put us in prison, you know, for out doing our job. They're actually trying to help us to make sure we're following the rules of engagement. And that's what we did by explaining it to them and by making sure that those shooter statements actually described what the situation was and why it happened. Yeah. And them not being there, it seemed unnecessary at first because for us on the ground, we knew that if a civilian was killed, the civilian populace was going to go

while the government officials were going to know and we immediately send that up to chain of command. We knew we had Iraqi soldiers with us. We had Iraqi soldiers with us on every, almost every single, 98% of operations we did, we had Iraqis, probably more, but we had Iraqi soldiers with us. They're not going to just watch as civilian Iraqis are getting killed. We had Iraqi interpreters, as you mentioned, that are out there, they're watching us take shots. We had, you know, and some of them were Jordan, some of them were Lebanese, but they saw who were killing. We had conventional forces that are out there every single day, interacting with the local populace, trying to build relationships. They're trying to win the hearts and minds, and now all of a

sudden we're going out and shooting civilians like it was insane for us to think that that could be happening and like killing a civilian or an unarmed person was really just totally unacceptable on all fronts the Iraqi army the Iraqi Ramadi government the US army the Marine Corps our guys and so when you're when you have all that and someone goes hey we need to know we need to know why you killed this person like what are you talking about so I was like okay we need to just take a step back why are they asking those questions well it's because they're not here And that's why that attitude of come and investigate, come with us, come down and see what we're doing. And I learned this from the Army.

I learned this from the first of the 506. They had some incident happen. And they were like, hey, come and look at what happened. Do you want to know what happened? Come and look. And raise your hand and say, come and investigate. If you think we're doing something wrong or if we think we did something wrong, raise your hand and say, hey, come and investigate this. We need a second, second of eyes.

And that is a totally positive thing. Totally positive thing. And we did that. And we got investigated. And it was like, oh, here's the outcome. Here's what you did. Here's why you did it. You followed the rules of engagement.

Here's what was uncovered. Okay, cool. So if you're operating within the ROE, which is what we stuck to, and you can articulate that, and you do articulate that properly. And the investigation shows, yeah, you followed the ROE. you engage the target as you should you have nothing to hide you have you have you only say this is what's happening so it was actually great and I look back now I'm so happy that we did those shooter statements I'm so happy that when we got investigated we got investigated

because it's like yep this is what we did this is why we did it and the other thing is you know clearly if you're doing things and you're not doing the right things you're going to jail Like you're going and you're getting shut down. You're going to jail. That's what's going to happen. But when you, if you, and if you cover it up, it's going to get even worse. It's going to, you know, learning from that event with in 2005, thank God I learned that event. Look, I'm not saying I would have been doing nefarious things, but it made it very easy for

me to explain to you and your guys and Seth's guys, hey, if you try and cover something up, you're going to get burned. There's no such thing as a cover-up doesn't work. It doesn't work. And there was no way that you were going to actually hide that. I mean, as we said for all the reasons, you know, we have this huge civilian populace. You have embedded reporters that are out of operations. You have Iraqi soldiers that are worthy you for all the reasons that you said.

It was unacceptable to go out there and kill civilians. We're trying to protect the civilians. We're trying to actually build the relationship and secure them so that ultimately we can win in this counter-insurgency fight. And, you know, that's something that you taught me, the big cover-up is always wrong. It's always wrong. I remember that statement.

And, you know, one of the biggest lessons that we brought back to help young leaders after that time in Ramadi to pass on to the next generation of SEALs, as you were running training, and I was running training, to say, hey, this temptation, like, you think taking care of your people

means that, like, you're going to have their, you let them know, you have their back no matter what, then that's totally wrong. The worst thing that you can ever do is help is, is, the worst thing you can ever do as a leader is let your people know or even think that you're going to have their back no matter what. Because we made it absolutely clear that, look, if you can articulate a reasonable certainty of hostile intent, we got your back all day long. If you can't do that, then I don't have your back.

And that's why we got to follow the rules of engagement. This is why this is black rights, why we have to follow the rules of engagement. And the cover up stuff, you know, the idea that like, so it's a temptation of like, hey, I don't want an investigation if, you know, if this thing happened or if that thing happened. I don't want an investigation on us. Hey, we'll just, you know, we'll just, like the example that you used, hey, we'll fire the weapon of the wall and drop the weapon on the guy and say, hey, this is, you know, this is totally good to go. And it's not.

And instead, if instead, what you have to do is say, hey, we shot a civilian, you know, this is why we made that decision. Here's why we had a reasonable, certainly impossible intent. You're going to get an investigation. There's going to be an investigating officer. You're going to file statements and a JAG. And actually, this is, this is what we're going to do in order to protect us to show everybody that this is actually, that this was done in the correct manner in a course of the rules of engagement. And it was a very interesting way of looking at those investigations because I didn't, I didn't, I didn't, I never want to be investigated. I want to protect my people and I wanted to have their back as a leader.

You know, that's, that's where you go. And you help me see that, no, come and investigate. Come and investigate. Look at this. And we had a situation happen where, you know, we had an individual, we were sitting in a sniper overwatch position. We had an individual come in the gate. We'd zip tied the gate. So we went in there nighttime off the boats from the river.

So this was a big compound. There was some mobile buildings in this compound. And the buildings had been vacated. So they had been lived in. It looks like not too long ago, but there was no one in them at the time. We were occupying them. So we had multiple overwatches. We'd zip tied the gates.

And we thought we had zip tied the entire gate. We didn't realize that there was a walk-in gate. We just zip tied the vehicle gate, the larger gate that opened, and there was a walking gate. So the sun had come up. We were observing this was ahead of a big operation that was going to happen with the Marine Corps in a very bad area of Vermont, where they couldn't even get to us without some massive clearance operations to dig the IEDs out of the road. And the boat certainly couldn't get out there on the daytime as well because they've gotten shot off the river. So the sun comes up.

We engage some targets. they're shooting in us. We knew that the insurgents knew where our position was. And as all of a sudden, I hear one of my cybers yell, hey, someone's in the compound. There was an individual had opened a walk-in gate that we had not seen at nighttime to zip tie. They'd opened a walk-in gate and pushed. So it's a, it's a military-age male pushing a wheelbarra full of heavy equipment. And it clearly was heavy. these pushing it up against, he pushes it right up against the building. And the, the, the, the, the, the, the sniper that was observing this, comes off his sniper rifle, grabs his, his import rifle, and engages this individual because he has a reasonable certainty of hostile intent that this is a guy who's

planning an IED up next against the building. Which, just real quick, that's a absolute executed tactic, technique and procedure by the enemy. The enemy at this juncture, We had known before we were there and while we were there if there was Snipers in an overwatch position they would the enemy would put IEDs outside that building so when the sniper team went to leave They would get IEDs clacked off on them and in fact Within days of this operation that you're talking about the Marine Corps had gotten blown up on X-fill. I think they had two killed and like like three wounded like like I mean that happened I matter of fact I briefed that I briefed that as one of the points of hey we need to be watching out for this this is what they're doing

now so all that's in this particular sniper's head he sees someone putting a wheelbarrow up against the building that you're in he's probably getting ready to clack off an IED so yeah he made the decision took the shot and he makes a split second decision he literally has like seconds as the gate opens this guy, trucks his wheelbar in. And this had been a guy who was, he had been observing our position. He'd been talking to a group of people and pointing in our direction. It was a guy that we've been watching. And again, we've been shot at. So we knew they, they knew our position. So he drops, he brings the wheelbar right up next to the building and the sniper engages him. We go out there. And as our EOD bomb technician is looking,

looking at looking at this wheelbarra. I mean, this wheelbarra is full of like heavy equipment. There's like there was like a sandbag or like burlap sack filled with piping material with wires coming out of it. And as he's looking at that, it's not an ID. We can't, there's no explosive there. It looks extremely shady, you know, from every, every angle. And yet as he's actually looking at it and he's meticulously, you know,

looking at it's it's it ends up not being an ID so we have uh I don't know what that individual was doing I'm pretty dang sure that he was probing us and and that if even if that wasn't an ID he was gonna see maybe he was maybe the insurgents said to go see how close you can get take this wheelbarra and because the next time it was going to be an ID to see if that was a viable tactic I don't know I don't know if we'll ever know all we know is now we have we have a individual who is wounded And what we thought was an ID isn't an ID. And so what we did was bring that guy inside and our seal Corman, who's got some incredible

life savings skills, goes to work on that guy and does everything he can to try to save that individual in accordance with the rules of engagement. And according to the Geneva Convention. And then the law of armed conflict. So this is what we have to do as a, you know, in accordance with all that. And so, and it was the right thing to do. So the SEAL corps is expending our life-saving medical equipment to try to save this guy's life and did everything he could. And just because of the gravity of his wounds, we were not able to save him.

But we called that into the Marine Corps. And so we actually had two different investigations because of that. It was through our own Special Operations Command, and we had a Marine investigation that was conducted. We sat down with the Jags. We talked about it after that operation was concluded. And we brought that individual back. We brought and delivered him to the Marine Corps so that his body could be recovered

and given back to his family and reparations made in every way that they could make them. And those two investigations both cleared us to show that the SEAL sniper acting in accordance with the rules of engagement. He had a reasonable certainty of hospital. intent. As you said, those Marines had just experienced something very similar to that, where a bomb was planted right next to their building and killed a couple of Marines and wounded several others. So it was an unfortunate and horrible situation that happened, but we did everything we could to try to save that guy. And this is the realities of war, that even when you try to minimize collateral damage, there are things like that that happened. And when it does happen, you don't try to cover it up or try to make it sound like something it wasn't or plan. a weapon on the guy or pretend like it didn't happen because everyone would have known about it.

Everyone would have known about that. What you do is take the investigation, come investigate, see what happened. This is why this decision was made in accordance of the rules of engagement. We required a bunch of interviews that required sworn statements. And ultimately, we were cleared as a result of that, that it was a shot that was taken in accordance with the rules of engagement because there was a reasonable certainty of hostile intent in that situation. So young leaders, old leaders on care, if you're, that story right there is just so important for people to understand.

It's so important, especially military law enforcement. That story right there is so important for you to understand. The move is, this is what happened. Come investigate. That's the move. like you just said to say okay hey let's plant some explosives on hey breacher give us some of your breaching charges and we'll make it look like he had explosives give him a weapon put a put an old AK in his wheelbarrow any of those things then we won't get if you make that move you are going to

get busted and rightfully so you're you're it's going to get found out they're going to go oh he had explosives oh this is American explosive oh this is that this this uh serial number goes back to your task unit so this is you or the weapon oh the guy up the street said this weapon was taken from his house by you four days earlier you're getting busted or whatever you are not or somebody in the in the platoon or somebody in the Marine Corps concerned I saw that guy get shot and then I saw those guys you know or somebody with a cell phone was sitting in a recording any or with a camera any of these things that's what's what's going to happen and you're screwing yourself and you're screwing your guys over by trying to

cover this up and by lying about it. So number two, don't do that. I'm saying number two, because number one has to have already taken place. And number one is you make sure that your troops know that if you do something that is immoral, unethical, or illegal, you will not have their back.

Hey, if they do something that is within the rules engagement, if they're doing the right thing for the right reasons, Not only do you have their back, you will die for them. That's what the SEAL teams is. You, you, you, you, you, I will die for you, you're my brother. But if you do something that's illegal, immoral, or unethical, I don't have your back anymore. And you know what I used to tell, guys, there's nothing I can do for you. There's nothing I can do for you.

You, oh, you like me, because I'm going to, I'm going to help you out, and I'm helping you with your getting to the right schools, and I'm helping you with your evaluations, and I'm helping you with your career and you did something stupid over the weekend and we're going to bring it up the chain of command we're going to get it taken care of I'm helping you you do something that's immoral illegal or unethical I can't help you I remember that actually used to scare guys a little bit because I had a lot I had a lot of clout if you did some dumb shit you did some stupid stuff you got into you got into some little incident out there I'm going to get it taken care of I am I'm going to take care of you you get in some trouble you you get in some trouble you're You make a mistake, you do something that you shouldn't have done, you stepped outside the box a little bit, okay, there's gonna be some price to pay, but we're gonna get it squared away. But if you do something that's immoral, that's illegal, that's unethical, I'm not gonna be able to help you, and I'm not gonna help you. So that's step one. And actually the way Admiral McCraven was talking about, like there's red lines, you got outside these red lines, there's nothing I can do for you. There's nothing I can do for you anymore. You're on your own. You need to know that.

But where guys, where leaders slip up is they don't want to say that. They don't want to say that because it's kind of sound like, I mean, even even even sitting here in this room with you, my brother, Laif Babin, saying like, hey, I got your back to a point doesn't feel right. Doesn't feel right. It's like, what do you mean? You got my back to a point. Hey, here's the here's how this comes full circle. The way that I have your back 100% is by making sure that you know, you know what. what the rules are and what lines you cannot cross

and if you cross them, you're on your own. That's what we're talking about. This is the crux of what we're talking about. And you as a leader have gotta say that. You have a leader as a leader, that's step number one to make sure that the team realizes that there's lines that if they cross, you will not have their back because they're doing something that they shouldn't be doing.

And the honor of our country and the honor of the teams, trumps your stupidity or your your your nefarious behavior and I don't got you anymore that's where leaders mess up they don't they don't clarify that and that crushes them I always felt comfortable because I know that you guys do that and that's you know like whatever it is me You know. You know, you know there's lines. Everybody knows there's lines with me.

You know not to cross them. You know there's certain things. If you do it, you're fucked. I will destroy you. I will hate you. You know, if you do something that gets our platoon in some situation where we don't go to war, I'm going to hate you forever. And I'm probably going to try and kill you.

Within the rules of engagement. Within the rules of engagement. But you know what I'm saying? It's like, listen, everyone understood me in the fact that the most important thing to me was we have a job to do. And we are going to do this job. And look, part of doing this job is we take care of our troops. How do we take care of our troops? We make sure that they understand what the rules of engagement are.

They understand if they cross those rules of engagement, there's nothing I can do for them. There's nothing you can do for them. There's nothing anyone can do from them. They're on their own. I think what's so powerful for me for that, Jocko, is it was, as I was saying earlier, like that, it just crystallized on my mind like this is black and white. And I remember you saying, you know, that that's what, that's what good leadership actually is. That's what good leadership actually is. You're screwing me over if I think, hey, I can just get away whatever I want.

Jock was got my back. We're going to cover it up. You're actually setting me up for failure. Absolutely. And disaster. for me, for the platoon, for our mission, for everything. And I think you just crystallize my mind like that is, no, that's what you do as a leader. That's what you do.

That's what good leadership looks like so that I could execute with 100% confidence. You know, and I remember that you telling us, when we're talking about the Wilson Engagement, we said it was black and white. The words that you used were, because I remember coming up in the Naval Academy, you know, I would be told things like, well, you know, you've got to do the right thing because it's the right thing to do. And when you're on the battlefield, the right thing can, it's kind of, it's kind of hard to determine sometimes. When you're fighting against an evil enemy, and I remember what you would say was you can't do

what you think is right. You have to do what's legal. And so it made it totally crystal clear in my mind. And for us and tasking a bruiser out there, like, okay, what is legally, what do you have to do in the situation? So we're going to, we're going to do the thing that is legal and moral and ethical. So we're going to do what's right and legal. That makes it clear in my mind.

And it helps me understand the decisions I have to make, not only me, but for everybody else in the platoon, for those in Delta platoon, for all of Tasking and Brewzer. And then you taught that to the next generation of SEAL leaders. I remember you giving that brief every time you came in, you know, for the junior officer training course, a leadership program that I was running, to all of the seals that you trained through three years of training, you know, to pass these lessons on of like, that is your job as a leader. Yeah.

Is to make sure that your people are following the rules, are not doing stupid shit that's going to, that's going to, you know, get them sent to prison for the rest of their lives, impact our mission and cause strategic damage to our mission, or our tarnessed the legacy and heritage of the SEAL teams. And that was something that you crystallize in my mind and that I went going forward knowing I knew exactly what I needed to do

as a leader in order to maintain that standard. And it was very black and white. Yeah, you know, I've been talking a lot lately about the mob mentality that the that the team has any team You know company whatever they've got this mob mentality working and that mob will start to do things as a mob And you as a leader can't be in the mob You can't be in the mob because then you can't tell which direction they're going sometimes are going in a great direction And you can just sit back and you can encourage them let them go but when they start going in the wrong direction You're the one that has to pull the reins and this doesn't matter you know we could have a sales team that's starting to sell a bunch of stuff and they're making some good deals but

They're starting to cut margins and if you're part of that we're hitting records and like yeah, we're gonna sell the most we ever sold this month and you're all excited about it with the rest of the team All of a sudden you're losing money You can't do that you have you can't be inside that mob You've got to be stepped out say hey listen. I know we want to break records this month on our sales But our margins are getting too low we're not gonna be profitable we're gonna lose money The other the opposite thing could happen to where the teams not making good sales and they're all bummed out and they're not not being proactive and aggressive in their sales So you can't be bummed out too. You got to say hey, listen, we got this many days left in this month here's some things we're gonna do to make things happen. I just talked with boss. We're gonna cut margins a little bit more so we can get improve our price point. But if you're in the mob, you can't do that and then and this goes back to our earlier conversation and now we get back to combat you have to have the moral strength to say, hey, we can't do this here's the red line if you cross this red line you don't. have my support anymore and as a matter of fact you're gonna get arrested and that's

what's gonna happen if you don't make that clear as a leader you're you're absolutely failing and I think that with with us everybody knew and understood this and I think that's what was powerful and that's why it was so appreciated by the Army and the Marine Corps the Army and the Marine Corps had us out there on you know they wanted us to support every operation that they did the reason because we had the most squared away well we look I'm not going to compare not not the most we had they knew they could count on us to make the right decisions out there on the battlefield they knew that with with the highest

percentage of certainty they knew if we had an incident that happened like you're talking about what we do we would raise our hand and say this is what happened just like in the opening chapter of extreme ownership that you know who knew about that blue-on-blue when it happened you know who would figure out what had had gone down? You know who knew what had happened? One person, me. Me.

I'm the one that actually said, oh, this was a blue-up. No one else knew. No one else knew. And what did I do? Went back to the battalion commander and said, hey, sir, this was a blue-on-blue. This was a blue-on-blue. This is what happened. I explained it to him.

I actually didn't have to do that. I actually didn't have to do it. And you know what? Eventually it would have come out most likely, but, and I would have looked like a real jackass, and I would have been in prison. but to say, hey, here's what happened. I know what happened, and here's how it went down. Okay, got it.

When you start covering stuff up, you're terrible. So the Army, the Marine Corps, they knew that they could count on us. They could count on us to do the right thing, and they could count on us if we made some kind of a mistake. What we would do is raise our hand and say, hey, here's what happened. Please come and investigate so we can make sure it doesn't happen again. And that's why they have us come. conducting operations until the day we left we conducted operations that entire time the the conventional forces trusted us implicitly with hundreds and hundreds of shots taken

hundreds and hundreds of enemy killed with precision and lethality and all the while protecting the local populace and that's what you do when you understand and you lead that's how you maintain the moral high ground. You take ownership of what you do. You take preemptive ownership. You know that you're the one that's going to be responsible. And then you do the right thing. You do the legal thing.

You do the lawful thing. That's how you can come back and hold your head high and say we did what we're supposed to do. And that's how you can be proud of what you did. And you know, that's one of the things, you hear these, the news media is out there, books are out there, articles are out there. And what really is terrible about those things is the incredible sacrifices that were made.

Incredible sacrifices that were made. And you think about all those soldiers and Marines in the Battle of Vermont, you think of tasking a bruiser, the sacrifices that were made. And for you know people to say oh well there's they were killing civilians It's it's it's disgusting it's actually disgusting speaking of speaking of the moral low ground like to to propagate that type of information Would it just it's sickening

But lessons can be learned and I'm glad we're able to get together because I know like a I said, I feel like I was ahead of the power curve just a little bit. I was ahead of that crest of the wave. I was lucky enough to have a very lucky career. I happened to go to Iraq at the right time. I happened to do a bunch of operations. I happen to work for the admiral. I happen to be a prior enlisted guy.

I happen to be a freaking English major. All those things. I happen to have a good understanding at the right time. You happen to come work for me. You happen to be humble enough to listen to what I had to say. Seth happened to be humble enough to listen to what I had to say the platoons happen to have the respect for you guys that to nod their head and say yeah this makes sense So you add those things together that's leadership and it's hard But it all boils down to that idea

You have to maintain the moral high ground you have to you have to and you do that by taking ownership preemptive ownership of what you do if something goes wrong you take ownership of that. And then as you mentioned, you do the right thing, the legal thing, the lawful thing, the ethical thing. And then you don't have to worry about anything else. With that, any other comments, Leif, it's a heavy subject. It is a heavy subject, but I could tell you that I couldn't be more proud of the incredible seals that I served with in Taskin-a-bruiser and how they conducted themselves on the battlefield. I mean, just what an extraordinary group of men and to honor my lifetime to get to serve alongside them in an incredibly difficult and violent battlefield and they went out day after day and put their lives on the line and some

sacrificed their lives like Mikey Monsor and Mark Lee and Ryan Job and I think the just the how they conducted themselves in the midst of that battle is something that I'll always be proud of you know the discipline that they used how they follow the rules of engagement the collateral damage that they minimize and the impact that they had as a result of that. And it's definitely something I'm proud of. And we can be proud of that because we understood the rules of engagement and we had the moral high ground. And we maintain the moral high ground.

And we knew we were on the right side of that conflict. And it was the honor of my lifetime to serve with you, to ask you and a bruiser and be a part of them. Yeah. We were not the first and we won't be the last and there's people that are listening this right now They're gonna be in those leadership positions There's there's people that are you you might be listening this right now It might be in three years it might be in three months it might be in 10 years I didn't shoot my weapon at the enemy enemy for 13 years

for 13 years But just know just listen to what we're saying look we try and teach our our leadership lessons all the time cover moves Simple, prioritize and execute, decentralized command. We literally started a company to pass these lessons on. But if you are not thinking about these truly impactful lessons that we were, that we got to live through. We got to live through it. And, you know, I said that before about combat. You go, you go through combat.

You don't wish it on anybody. but you're I'm as you said it was an honor that we actually got to do what we did and the lessons that we learned we try and teach but this is like another area and and you know sometimes I think it seems obvious you know it's something it seems obvious now but I also know and as a matter fact you and I were talking about this yesterday there's a lot of pressure on a young leader There is a ton of pressure on a young leader. All kinds of pressures. You want to be liked.

You want to get the job done. You don't want to let your guys down. You want your guys to respect you. You want to do the right thing. But at the same time, sometimes the right thing is viewed as different by different people. All those things. All those things are going on. All those things are going on.

Let me tell you this. There's no escaping this. There's no escaping this. You have to own what happens in. your team you have to you have ownership of that there's no getting out of it there's no sloughing it off on anybody else you can't do it when you when something happens it's yours you own it when your sniper takes a shot you might as well pull the trigger when your machine gunner lays down fire you might as well be the

person laying down fire it's on you it's on you and if you have that attitude You might recognize that, hey, I got to get control of this situation. And if you think you can cover things up, you can't. It's always going to come out. So if you're in a leadership position, do me and Laif a favor and lead. It's not easy. It's not easy. It's especially not easy right in that moment.

That's when it's most important. With that, appreciate everybody listening. What do you got? Echo. Give us a freaking what we used to call that rough transition no no give us a rough transition man We're not transitioning out yet okay I got some questions So you mentioned rewind a little bit are you gonna ask Leif if you have to be in the Navy to be a seal Lief you haven't heard this yet at the end of the podcast question

At the end of the podcast with Adam O' McCraven Echo Charles who is a grown man He's been he's been on this podcast with me for seven years. He sat and listened to hundreds of military books and military guests. Am I built up enough? He asked Admiral McRaven,

do you have to be in the Navy to be an admiral? Well, anyways. What do you got for us today? I guess, I mean, technically, he could be a Coast Guard album. Good point. Yeah, actually he said that, right? He did say that. He was like, well, I guess in the Coast Guard

or something like that. What a pro. He was a pro. I do. I actually, no, I wasn't pro. I didn't know if I thought you were leading up to a joke I thought this was gonna go somewhere He's like do you have to be in the Navy to be an hammer well and you I could see like Admiral flashed eyes me for like a millisecond like is this real and I was just like oh no it is

I'm he's like he went into it so I go ahead I can give a perception of that because remember we had We had an individual and in our in our task unit that we we called Captain obvious and then he wasn't he got promoted he got promoted to Admiral obviously And then that didn't sound cool enough, so we had to go to field martial obvious. Field martial obvious. So I guess you could definitely be Admiral obvious and not be in the Navy. All right. Well, what do you got?

Clarification from that. Thank you, Jocko, for that rundown. But no, clarification was I said, how do I become Admiral? Which is an equally dumb question. No, that's it. Not for someone on the outside because it's like, hey, remember we, this is we to discuss it afterwards. Like, what's like the process?

You know, like sheriff, you kind of got to run for sheriff, right? Yeah, okay. Or like governor is different than just getting promoted to guy. Anyway, I didn't know that process. I'm dating a jerk. I'm sorry. Oh, yes, that's true. And then through that asking process, I said, what, do I have to, I have to be in the Navy?

You know, like, almost like confirming it because I figured, but I don't know. Maybe you could be in the Coast Guard or Marines. I don't know. I didn't know for sure. Cool. Marines, you're going to be a general. What's your question for today? All right.

Rewind back to the trophies, taking trophies. War trophies, yeah. Damn, you've been thinking about that for the last three hours. A little bit, because it kind of makes sense. What you're saying makes sense. But so why do you think that they're like, hey, that's not, that's not permitted at all? Because technically. I'll tell you what.

Go ahead. I figure anyway, and I don't know, maybe this is the answer where it feels like it could be a slippery slope, almost like a, you know, like your thing with the drinking and the big boy rules and all that stuff. Where it's like, big boy rules, right? You'd think, you know, in a nutshell, it's like, okay, big boy rules. Everyone's responsible here no problems But inch by inch probably problems can come about and then if you take that to like an extent like an extreme You got just people drinking all the time. Yeah kind of the same deal yeah I think you're right I think it's just a the easiest blank the easiest way to lead this is say no war trophies

It doesn't make it the right thing to do but yeah I could see the slippery slope being like oh we're gonna have guys you're trying to smuggle back Yeah, what they should have said is like, hey, here's a protocol. Yeah. You know, every, every, you know, company-sized element is allowed to take back three enemy weapons. They have to go through this process, you know. And I kind of said, like, it'd be cool to have one on my wall, which it would be. Yeah. But at a minimum to say, like, a company-sized element is allowed to take some war trophies for their freaking heritage, you know?

like at SEAL Team 3 right now, there should be a wall that has some RPG, some Iraqi insurgent RPGs. They did do that in Vietnam. Like, there's SEALs that brought stuff home from Vietnam. I think the statute of limitations is probably clear by now, but you know, you can go and you can see like they have some of that stuff. They'd have in some of their, sometimes we'd have old like chikoms in the weapons in the armory. So they would bring stuff home. Moki Martin and other Vietnam Air Seals would, we had that displayed on the old SEAL Team one quarterdeck with a B-40 rocket that had been shot at them and some AK-47s and things

like that, you know, just weapons that they'd recover. So there's a real heritage thing to it. I think the bummer about this is that for really senior people, they were able to make that happen. You know, so they're like, hey, I'm going to put that in my office. I've got this. So like they pulled strings. I know there's some,

there's some senior people out there that have that stuff in their office. But I think for the frontline troopers that were like, hey, man, it'd be really cool to have this, you know, this FN, FAL that we, we captured on target from this particular bad guy, you know,

demilled and like put up, put on the wall. And we weren't allowed to do that. It was like no war trophies. Yeah. whatsoever. It was like evil and bad. And yet then you like walk into a command and you're like,

oh, where did that come? Oh, that 2005. Like bad guy, okay, check. God. We mess that up. So, yeah, war trophies next time, you know, think about that. They're leaders. Give the opportunity to put some protocols in place.

Here's your war trophy. You ever seen the movie Three Kings? No, I haven't seen it, but I know what it's about. They find gold, right? In Iraq. Yeah, I mean, there's kind of more to it. So if, and we won't go into the movie, I know you're thankful. But it's like one of those things where, hey, you know,

We go on these missions and maybe there's like some downtime. And remember, oh, I remembered that one guy he might have, and it's a hypothetical, obviously. That one guy, he had a bunch of, I don't know, cool weapons. We caught them. No one grabbed the weapons. Let's go back and get those weapons for our war trophy. Kind of a thing.

Like, it's almost like you can kind of imagine a scenario like that where, you know, people might take it upon themselves to maybe or skew the priorities of their presence there. Yep. in favor of war tropies in general. Another reason for the rule. Yeah. Right, right.

And that's kind of what the Three Kings movie was about essentially. It could, that's another reason. Maybe there's some, you know, thing I'm not thinking about, but for me. Because technically think about any rule where it's like, wait a second. There's no rule against this. That thing can lose control real quick. That's why you put a protocol in place. Yeah.

You know, that's why you put a protocol in place. And to your point, echo, there's always some jackass that does, you know, if you allow something like that, somebody goes and lutes or does something stupid. And, you know, the one person does something bad and prevents other people. You know, but I mean, to me, I look at it as like, hey, if your grandfather took a luger off a German officer and, you know, in Bastogne and, you know, World War II, that's a pretty freaking cool family heirloom, you know, to have around. Like, that's something to, that thing is, or a flag, you know, or, I mean, it's not just weapons, but it's, there's, there's some neat things like that that, that I think

are worth having that preserve history. Yeah. And when you start talking about the slippery slope, just going back to this whole conversation we just had about ethics and what you're going to do and what you're not going to do and literally taking care of the boys, right? Taking care of the boys.

Look, if J.P. Dinell is 23 years old and he gets in a fight out in town, guess what? I'm going to do what I can to make sure that he doesn't get in any trouble at all. and I'm going to take care of him. Now, is he going to maybe get some freaking, get an ass chewing?

Is he absolutely? Is he going to get some extra duty? Is he, absolutely? Is he going to be the designated driver on the next three trips that we go on? Absolutely. So there's this, I don't want to, number one, I don't want to give the impression

because it's not the right impression that I was like, oh, you know, if you cross, if you disobey any rule at any time, I'm going to, you know, you're out. That's not what we're talking about. I probably should have clarified that better. Like, hey, you're a young team guy. You're going to do some dumb stuff.

You're a young, whatever, Marine. You're going to do some dumb stuff. I'm not going to wreck your career over it. Right? So there is that. And I'm actually probably kind of known for that. Like if you, hey, look, man, you do something dumb out in town or you make a mistake or you, even, you know, going through the house, you do something stupid. It's like, oh, I'm going to ruin your career.

No, actually, I'm going to train you. Going back to what I said earlier, if J.P. Dinell gets in a fight out in town, whose fault is it? It's actually my fault. I actually didn't do a good job explaining how if J.P. can't go on deployment with us, he's aiding al-Qaeda. Do you think J.P. Donnell wants to hear the words, you're aiding al-Qaeda? The freaking guy would go nuts. So it's actually my fault. But if I didn't do a good job of making him understand that and then he ends up getting in trouble, well, I failed him.

I'm not going to fail them twice. I'm going to say, dude, all right, listen, you just got your freaking, you just got your alcohol drinking card pulled. You're not allowed to drink anymore until we get back from deployment. You are the designated driver from now on. You are going to do whatever little assignments to get him tightened up and make sure he doesn't get in trouble again. So that's how you take care of the boys.

And then it goes into, hey, there's things. that you could do that are immoral, illegal, unethical, and if you cross those lines, you're on your own and I'm actually gonna do my best to crush you because I don't want you to misrepresent the teams, the nation, our country. So just I wanted to get that point of clarification because I don't want a bunch of my guys that work for me over the years and they're going, what are you talking about? Because yes, if you did something stupid, I was going to handle it. I was no I was I just had a couple of conversations over the past weekend. You know, we went to had some retirement ceremonies and whatnot and I had some great conversations with guys

that were like oh hey remember when you when I did this and you you this is what you did to me and basically what I did to them was punish them on by myself not running up the chain of command and I had I for some reason this this is an interesting. statement. I didn't mind. If someone did something dumb, I didn't mind being the senior guy with a secret. Like the senior guy, look, okay, this happened, you did something stupid. It stops with me. You're going to get punished. And by the way, if my boss calls and says, what the hell I just found out about this. You know what I say? Oh, yeah, sir. I didn't want to bother with you. Here's the punishment that I administered. Here's, you know, he's no longer allowed to drink. He's the designated

driver for the next six months. Like all those things. That's what I did. I'm okay with that. And My boss still might get mad, but my boss probably is going to say, all right, Roger that. I got it. Next time you better give me a heads up in case this comes back. So being the senior man with a secret on something that you have handled and something that's not like a stain on the reputation of the teams or a transgression of the morals of a human, I got you. you do some dumb shit like you know we we were I did a whole freaking video

we did a whole podcast about doing dumb shit and if you do some dumb shit you work for me and you're a good dude I'm gonna make sure you do less of it you know Laif you did some dumb shit right guess what I did plenty of dumb shit you did plenty of dumb shit

did I freaking write you up and and and give you a bad fit rep no because you just did some dumb shit we're gonna learn from it no big deal fucking stoner think stoner wasn't out doing dumb shit come on this dude was captain dumb shit right he's getting out there getting after it what are we doing like hey bro you can't do that here what what think about the repercussions think about what you know like we think through these things so again i don't i don't want to sit here and give this impression that we're over

here running the boy scouts right we're over here running the boy scouts because we're not we're not the Boy Scouts the Boy Scouts doesn't have to kill people for a living we do But the the people that are gonna kill people for a living they've got a lot of testosterone in their body You know how testosterone affects people you know makes people want to fight makes people want to go get with girls This is what happens this is not like this is the physiological stuff that goes down So what kind of person wants to become a frog man I'll tell you what kind of person go be wants to become a frog man he's got a high testosterone level he wants to fight he wants to break shit that's what he wants to do I actually want that guy in my

platoon and it's my responsibility to make sure he knows what to break and who to fight and who to kill that's my responsibility to take that frogman and keep him contained and make sure he doesn't get in trouble that's on me so I just wanted to clarify that point could make sense so maybe back to the trophy's thing Maybe all your forefathers were to Vietnam. They took trophies, right? It wasn't a rule, whatever. And then after a while, maybe it kind of started to get out of hand.

Then someone was like, hey, no trophies. See what I'm saying? Maybe they could do it. And that's why the rule was made. There I got mine. Yep. Something like that. I don't know.

Yeah. And you could see where all of a sudden it turns into, you know, every single person's got their war trophy. Which, honestly, I'm still good with that. Like, I think it should be like, hey, if you deploy. and you're in combat arms, you can bring back one, you know, weapon.

And you know what? I bet you're right, too. Like, I've heard some of those stories about, like the Marines going on the beach and they come back out and the Navy guys would do anything to get, you know,

a Japanese freaking samurai sword or whatever, a German luger. You know, then maybe you get into black market stuff. Like, maybe it just escalates to the point where they just had to shut it down. But again, you need to make a protocol.

If you make a protocol, like you're allowed to take one, you're allowed one weapon. It needs to be demilled. It needs to be serialized. It needs to be assigned to you and you're going to sign for it. Eugene Sledge, you've ever talked about that with the old breed

where he's like making fun of the guys that that were coming in like the, you know, after they did all the fighting in Okinawa and Pelaloo and then like, oh, now you've got these guys that are showing up in like clean uniforms that are looking for like some souvenir to take home. They obviously weren't.

collecting souvenirs because they were busy fighting the Japanese. So I think there's those those things can be controlled, right? We're not talking about just uncontrolled looting and pillaging. We're talking about following up carefully, you know, crafted rules of engagement. When you're when you're talking about captured weapons that were enemy property that they now forfeited and we had a giant armory full of them at Tasky de-brouser when we were in Ramadi. We should have brought them all home. Yeah, it would be, demil them all. That would have been so awesome. It would have been really cool.

What did it? They weld them shut. So they can't work anymore. Okay. Just something to put up on the wall. So you don't have to worry about it. It's not a working weapon. Right.

Yeah. It's, it would have been super cool, though, to have that stuff. Yeah. That's, so sometimes I'm a little bit too much of a rule follower. You know, that's one of those situations. It's like, hey, you know, like,

here's a situation where I didn't follow the rules was they were hot on the photograph thing. Like, you're not allowed to take pictures of operations. and at my first appointment, we didn't. We followed the rule. Like I was like, hey, here's the rule. And so no pictures. It was so it was very limited pictures.

I don't have a lot of pictures from that first appointment. Again, there was some situations where guys took pictures. I'm actually, and I'm actually thankful. But probably a little while into our deployment, I kind of realized we better take pictures of our friends. And I'm really thankful that we did that because, we now have pictures of our friends that aren't here anymore, you know, and that's freaking awesome. But that was a rule. And it was actually a heavily enforced rule at the time because

photographs were against General Order Number One, like you weren't allowed to take pictures, you know, actually it wasn't General Order Number One. General Order Number One said you couldn't take pictures of like enemy combatants, but the NS, the Naval Special Warfare rule at the time was like no pictures of operations period that's it period and and so we weren't and then very quickly in deployment I cleared everyone how it was like hey take freaking pictures because we're we're gonna want them and that's one of those rules you know got it and I would I could easily explain that to anyone in my chain of command that would have said hey why did you take picture I said hey we were in a serious combat situation there was a chance someone was going to

get killed and I wanted it we asked to have pictures of our freaking friends and if you want to send me to a court martial for that let's go let's go because I think that's I think is actually the ethical and moral and right thing to do was to take pictures and we did so there's an example you know we didn't quite follow the rule oh well all right let's wrap this up you got any more questions echo Charles no no that was that was it Awesome. Hey, if you want to support this podcast, go to joccofuel.com. Get yourself some go drinks.

They're awesome. I'm too deep right now. Too deep into the jaco fuels. You only got down one? I got one citrus cycle. I got to get on it. Check. You can get those.

You can get the moke, the ready to drink milk, the pow-pow milk. Bro, I was on a call last night. Look at this guy. With one Dave Burke. Good deal, Dave. Good deal, Dave. So he actually brought up a good, or not a good question necessarily, but he brought up a question that got me thinking, hey, wait, we don't talk about like all the stuff

that Jocco Fuel actually has. I'm not going to do it right now necessarily, but yeah, protein. I'm not going to do it all now, but. People just press stop on the podcast. Go to joccofuel.com. You can see all this stuff because it's not just, we always blow up the drinks and the, you know, the energy drinks and the RTD because that's like super exciting right now you know but there's like all kinds there's like joint stuff like test stuff sleep stuff there's a lot of cool stuff on there

that we might be um doing a disservice in a small way of not mentioning for certain people well check this out go to joccofuel.com and you can check out all this stuff you can check out the joint warfare the super cool the time war time war all day the time war all day the i mean oh it's not all It's every day. Every day. It's just a good way to feel better across the board in a, in a legitimate way. So give that one a crack. You can get the stuff at Vitamin Shop.

You can get it at Wawa. Wawa, you're going to have to look a little bit. Trying to get, we're getting the squeeze. We're getting the squeeze from some of the big empire beverage companies. So, but vitamin shop, number one brand. Do you know that? No big deal. Yeah, we're in the military commissaries.

We're working on the military exchanges, too. God, it pisses me off when I go into the NEX and we don't, we're not in there. I like going to the commissary and we're in there. That's good. But the NEX and all they have is poison for our troops, for our troops. For these men and women that are putting their lives on the line. And they got to, then we're actively giving them stuff that's bad for them. Well, this is wrong.

So we're working on it. Haniford's dash stores, wake fern, shop, shop, right, H. H.E.B. Tejas. You gave me a report this morning from the field, Leif Babin. Yeah, representing, man. My local HGB's got an awesome, like, in-cap of Mulk and this one go. For the freaking outstanding.

It's awesome. Yeah, so rolling to H-E-B, rolling to Meyer out in the Midwest. Lifetime fitness is. Yes. Dude, have you been to a Lifetime Fitness? Yeah, yeah. They're insane. Have you been to a Lifetime Fitness?

I have. Freaking, massive, massive gym. Anyways, they're good to go. They're working it. Yeah. So go check all that out. Get yourself some jacofuil. Joccofuel.com.

It's true. Also, origin, USA. Mm-hmm. So you go to origin, USA.com. This is where we're getting our jeans. You know, there's a new black wash jeans. Yeah.

They're black. Yeah. You wear black jeans? I'm about to be wearing black jeans. You know what? You know, I am going to, I think those black jeans, especially when they're new

are going to be suitable for like a little bit elevated scenarios. You know what I'm saying? Yes, I do. Like date night. Yeah, exactly right. Yeah. And I know, hey, look,

I know you're not into the fashion rules. I don't know, maybe Lefeis, I don't know, maybe, maybe not questionably. He's doing good right now. But either way, so the darker, the gene, the more formal. Yeah, oh, yeah, you look good too, by the way. The more formal scenario.

The more formal scenario, yes, the more special, the scenario. So, like, daytime. scenario like a daytime event or whatever so more casual that's going to be the lighter jeans but i walk down like with a pair of jeans on and a t-shirt down from where down from my like house upstairs where my room is downstairs walk downstairs and my daughter my 13-year-old daughter sees me with like jeans and a black t-shirt on and she goes hey oh she's like oh why are you all dressed up yep and the dark jeans no no these were just jeans oh okay yeah this is how not dressed up

I'm getting that's pretty awesome yeah you know I love most about the origin jeans is they got that little stretch to them and uh and our gym store jihitsu we have a combatives uh program so we're we train we train with like weapons uh you know weapon shapes and stuff and they're they're awesome to roll in they're they're like it's it's it's plain clothes so you got to have your got your shirt locker shirt on and your uh your origin jeans stoic jiu jiu jutsu yeah what's the what's What's the address? What's the scenario? Where are we at?

We're in Dripping Springs, Texas. Dripping Springs, Tejas. Marcus Delfit, awesome instruction. And it's, yeah, every Friday we run a combatant's program for some of the sheepdog response. Instructors that train there. Tim Kennedy's program. Yeah. It's awesome.

It's, uh, the combatants program is, is legit. And those origin genes are, you know, everybody in there's training in origin genes. What's good about that is, um, you know, just the same way that I talk about Jiu-Jitsu, like, If somebody, if, if, if you don't train and someone grabs you, you have a level of panic and shock and unknown to overcome before you can even take action. Like, you're just frozen for at least, even if you're, even if you're a squared away person, you don't know what to do for at least three quarters of a second. And by the way, that could be all it takes. So when you start doing combatives, when you start training like you start training pistol, you start training knives, you start thinking through those things, you all of a sudden. you're okay and that three quarters of a second it starts to get minimized I'd actually have to

run the numbers let's see if you don't if you don't train jiu jitsu and someone grabs you you probably dealing with 10 seconds five seconds six seconds before you start processing what's happening in a legitimate way if you train jihitsu you're you didn't there's zero seconds you're already processing it's the same thing with like doing combatives doing weapons type training where someone's pulling a knife on you if you never seen it before you are no not knowing what's due for five seconds. Literally, even if the reaction is,

I know I need to run away. If you haven't fought through that before, that knife comes out and you freeze for three seconds. Guess what? You got stuck in the neck. You're bleeding out, homie. So,

so don't let that happen. Yeah. So actually, when you were setting up your gym, Stoic Jiu-Jitsu, you sent me the name. You're like, we're going to be called Stoic-Jiu-Jitsu.

I just, I stoically just nodded to myself. I thought, hell yeah. Hell yeah, especially because Mark's kind of stoic dude, right? Mark's the total stoic guy. So Stoog ju-choo, check it out, dripping springs. How many times a week do you have classes?

How many times a day do you have classes? Three, three class a day for adult classes, a couple kids classes. The Utes. Yeah. Money through Thursday as well. So it's a great program, awesome training down there. And yeah, that just quality instruction. Do you have a website?

Yeah, stoog jujitsu.com. Stoogdojitsu.com. Go get in there, people. Go get in there. Stoogujitsu.com. Freaking good name. It's a good one, man. You've done good.

You figure those Delta 68 genes are going to be kind of different and maybe even better in a way than even geepence when you think about it. As far as the mobility goes, is you're saying? Yeah. They're more mobile than geepants.

They are mobile. They are more mobile. We actually have some experimental phase geepants right now. Now there's going to be problems, right? Because you got IBJF, you got rules. You're not allowed to have stretch because it's going to interfere with things. But we're trying to see what is the parameters of that? Like what could be legal, right?

Because there's a certain amount of stretch that gives no difference as far as jiu-suitzoo goes, but giving you a little bit more of that mobility. Now, listen, as a jocco right now, I'm definitely not getting limited by my Jiu Jitsu Giants. I'm getting limited by my own freaking lack of ability to stretch. Your lack of mobility. Lack of mobility in my own self. So we're gonna watch out for that.

I was gonna say like right as I was saying that, I can just hear Pete right now yelling at me like all the like different things they've done to design the geep pants to be so mobile. I have a pair that's got, I have a pair that's got a little, just a little bit like he sent me the experimental ones. And here's a thing. I think if you didn't announce that they were stretched, no one would be able to tell.

Yeah. So I think that's probably gonna be the answer. Like it's so small, you can feel it, but you can't feel it. Right. You can feel it, but they can't feel it is what I'm getting at. Yeah, and that's how we would have to be because the stretchiness, I mean, obviously there's different ways.

You can have somebody grabbing your ghee pants and it stretches, yeah, it kind of defeats a lot of the purpose of the ghee to begin with, right? So, but the mobility or lack of mobility It's never been an issue in geepants, I don't think, especially the origin ones. I'm just saying stretch-wise because, look, look, we're putting on jeans. We're putting on jeans for a different reason than we put it on the geepants.

Let's face it. Apparently, I have some kind of a black tie event I'm going to, so I'm putting on jeans. It's all day, yeah? Hell yeah. So I get it. It's not that geepants are not mobile. It's just that as far as stretch goes, you're going for looks formal or informal, depending on who you are.

You put the jeans on. You're going to have some mobility in the event of you having to do jiu jih Tzu or combatives as the case maybe origin USA get yourself some of this stuff by the way it's made in america uh everything we just talked about going and fighting and trying to preserve freedom in the world that's awesome we appreciate the military 100% for sure we also have to appreciate economic power and right now we've shifted economic power overseas that's what We've done. We've done it.

Corporations have done it. They've just voluntarily said, oh, we can make an extra $1.78 cents on every pair of jeans. So we'll just fire everyone we have here in America and we'll move the factories overseas. And that's exactly what they did. Because they're scum. They're scum. Well, we're not doing that. We're building here.

Every, when you put on a pair of origin jeans or origin ghee or origin rash guard, You are putting on the cloth of the nation, actually. This is American made from the cotton to the rivets to the zipper. It's all American made. So get yourself on board with America. Get yourself into a situation where you are defending America and bringing back this economic power that we've given away. And by the way, it starts with manufacturing things like jeans and clothing. but we're reliant on other countries, actually adversarial countries for things that we need.

And that's terrible for our national security. So let's start. You can start with a pair of jeans. You may not feel like you're helping out our national security when you buy a pair of jeans, but you are. You're actually helping out our national security when you buy a pair of jeans. That's what you're doing. So look, you may or may not have served this country as a, military individual if you did thank you if you didn't you can still serve by by

building our economy so there you go origin usa.com also the shirt that Leif is wearing from Jocco store this is where the jocco store.com is where you can represent path that we're all on discipline equals freedom good as a case maybe all different attire items on there. The shirt locker, man. Those are my favorite shirts. They're awesome. You know,

shirt locker, if you don't know, is a subscription service. Every month you get a new shirt. You know, sometimes there's a hit. Sometimes there's a smash hit in the shirt locker design wise.

As Leif is demonstrating right now with his current shirt. Anyway, that one was a smash hit? Yeah, I think so. So a lot of people like that one. What was the Inspirato behind that shirt?

Okay. So it says if you're just listening, it says good, but it says in a fancy kind of cursive kind of way, kind of a black tie kind of affair. Calligraphy-ish, right? So it's kind of, yeah, like a black tie, right? So the idea is the layers, if you will.

Oh, that's the thing. All the designs have some sort of a story kind of layers behind it. The one for this one is, okay, so you know, good, right? The whole thing, it's like, hey, when things go bad, there's always some good to come from it. So when you said that, you were saying it in reference to the original source material was when Seth would be like, hey, you always say that,

like, you know, for real stuff in life, like military operations. like that kind of stuff. Not all of us are in that kind of, those kind of deep waters, you know, where we got to reference the good terminology, right?

Not all of us are in that. Some of us are kind of more on a, for lack of better term, a higher level, more, how should I say, every day kind of level. It's not down in the dirt.

It's kind of higher up on the, on the, maybe the street, maybe even the third, fourth, fifth floor level. We're talking, is this a first world good over here? Yes. That is exactly,

exactly what that shirt is. Think about it. Look at it. It's like it. So it's called good high level problem. So like, hey, look, high level problems, meaning not load down in the dirt. So it's high level, meaning, hey,

meaning that I'm trying to potty train my dog and it freaking went in my off home office. Right. You know what I'm saying? Like that kind of stuff. Meaning my Mercedes has a flat tire. Or what have you, or what have you. You know, these kinds of things.

My Cadillac escalade for the Ego Charles. It should be called high levels problems. It should be called good everyday problems. I think it should be called first world problems. First world problems. Yeah, I think so too. Yeah, which is, what the funny thing about that is, you legitimately have to say,

if you got a flat tire on your Cadillac escalate, Echo Charles, you can legitimate be like, good. You know, I got a Cadillac escalade, bro. It's true, man. Escalade. It's true. I get to practice my tire changing capabilities.

There you go. Like it. That's real. All right. So there you go, Jocco Store. Subscribe to this podcast. Jocco Underground. Subscribe to that to cost $8 and $18 signs a month.

Unless you can't afford it then you just email What an email? Assistance at jocco underground.com Subscribe to the YouTube channels We got We got for YouTube channels We got Jocko podcast We got Origin USA

We got JockFUFU we got Ashlawn Front We got Ashlawn front YouTube channel Yes we do Some content on there So go and check those out Subscribe to them We got psychological warfare

We got Flipside Canvas Dakota Meyer Dakota Meyer just A freaking stud and he's got studly stuff for you to hang on your wall. So go check out Flipside Canvas.com and go get something to hang on your wall. We got a bunch of books that we've written.

Check those out. Final Spin, Leadership Strategy and Tactics, Code, Discipline, Freedom Field Manual. The Way of the Warrior Kid series, there's five. I keep meeting people. I'm such a bad advertiser. I have people go, oh, yeah, I read your Warrior Kid book. The first one. Yeah, they're like, it's the best book ever.

I've had people say you should write more. I'm like, there's four more, kid in the game. Where's your parents? I'm a smack them around. It's their fault. Yeah, no, it's my fault, as I just said, because I haven't done a good job of putting the word out. So get those books for all those kids,

Mikey and the Dragons about face, extreme ownership and the dichotomy of leadership written by myself and Laf Bab and Sittnergr. You heard a lot from him today. So yeah, we wrote those books. So a while back, We also have a leadership consultancy, which is called Echelon Front, and we solve problems through leadership. We've worked with every different kind of company that you can imagine in every different industry.

We take lessons learned from combat, from the battlefield, from life, and we help you solve problems through leadership. You can go to Echelonfront.com for details. I know you're heading out after this going to work with a construction company. And good deal, Dave. Yep. And that's what we do. So let's say a construction company in this instance, they're wanting to perform better. They're wanting to do better.

Oh, what do they want to do better at? It doesn't really matter. They want to do better as a construction company. They have some issues. Okay, cool. How do we solve those issues? We solve those issues through leadership. That's what we do at Eshlamfront.

So go to Eshlandfront.com if you need help inside your organization. And we'll get a team out to you to assess. and then fix that's what we're doing we also have some live events I guess the next the next muster is Dallas October 18th through the 20th and we we oversold the last muster so we sell out and then we sell a little bit more so we we sold out it was it was it wasn't like overly crowded where you were stuffed in there but the none of the instructor staff or Eshom front staff got a seat we had to give it all up to people so My point is we sell out.

So you should, if you want to go to one of those things, you want to go to Gettysburg, you want to go to the Battle of Little Big Horn, you need to go and register now. You want to go to the FTX and see what it's like to utilize these things in simulated combat situations so that they really make sense. And then you can apply them in your life. Go to the FTX. So we got all those things. Go to eschatonfront.com. We also have an online training academy. where you can learn to take ownership of your life.

That's what you can do there. And man, it is magic. It's magic in the same way that jiu-jitsu is magic. It's magic in the same way that jiu-jitsu is magic. So back in the day, if you knew jiu-jitsu, you could win any fight, right? You could, you could, oh, this person's going to mess with me, cool, I'll beat them. Hoys Gracie, UFC 1, goes up against boxers and wrestlers and moitai and just is able to beat him. Why?

Because he understood this magic called Jiu-Jitsu. There's magic to leadership. And by the way, just what leadership means is interacting with other human beings. That's what it means. That's actually what leadership is. You're going to communicate to those human beings. You're going to build relationships with those human beings. And it doesn't matter if they're in your wife or your husband.

It doesn't matter if they're your coworkers at work. It doesn't matter if it's your children. football team. It doesn't matter if it's your buddy, your girlfriend. You have to interact with other human beings. That's what's going on. And there's actual moves. There's actual magic just like Jiu-Jitsu.

And if you want to learn some of that magic, you want to learn what to do when someone's irate with you. You want to learn what to do when someone is blaming you. You want to learn what to do when one of your soul's, Subordinates is not completing their projects on time. You want to know what to do when your boss is not making any decisions. You want to know what to do when your husband is leading the family in the wrong direction. And you want to get it steered in another direction.

Well, that's what we teach this little bit of magic. It's just like jiu-jitsu. You can get it all under control. Go to extreme ownership.com. We've got a bunch of courses on there. We do live sessions. What's the latest course? You know what the latest course to get posted is?

Yeah, it's relationships. Gee. Gee. Oh, I don't know how to work a relationship. Cool. Just like idiots used to say I know how to fight. You don't know how to fight. You don't.

You don't know how to fight. You don't know how to build relationships. There's actual tactics, techniques, and procedures that you can utilize to build relationships. Those are the facts. You don't know what they are. You think you know what they are, but you don't. Just like I was in 1992 thought I knew how to fight. As soon as I got on the mats of justice, I learned.

There's techniques. There's tactics. There's procedures. There's maneuvers. I didn't know. So it's the same thing with leadership. Go to extreme ownership.com. Learn how to lead.

And if you want to help service members active and retired, you want to help their families, their Gold Star families. Check out Mark Lee's mom. Mama Lee. She's got an incredible charity organization. If you want to donate, you want to get involved. Go to America. America's mighty warriors.org.

Also check out heroes and horses.org. That's where Micah Think is taking veterans out into the wilderness where they are finding themselves. It's really helping out a lot of individuals. So check that out. What else we got? If you want to connect with us, Laif, where are you at? On the interwebs.

Where are you at? What's your social media? Real Life Babin on Instagram. and Laf Babin on Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn. There you go. Echo's on there. It's true. He's at Echo Charles.

I'm at Jocko Willink. Just watch out when you sign into those things. They're tracking you. They're trying to get into your brain. They got that algorithm. The algorithm's coming after you. And it's strong. It has no rules of engagement, by the way.

It doesn't care. It doesn't care about collateral damage. It doesn't care that you are going to miss Jiu-Jitsu because you are watching something stupid. It doesn't care about that. It doesn't care about that. not paying attention to your kid because you're scrolling through your timeline. They should call it the time sucker, right?

The time eater, the time destroyer, not a timeline. Is timeline on Facebook or is timeline on Instagram or Twitter? One is timeline. One is news feed. Oh, yeah. It should be called the brain eater, not the news feeder because it's killing you. But we are on there. So there you go.

Lath, thanks for coming back. Appreciate it. Thanks for us good. We just talked for a long time, didn't we? Yes, we did. But at least we hit record at their appropriate time. And hey, thank you to all of our military men and women that are out there right now doing the right things for the right reasons, holding the line and protecting this great nation while defending the moral high ground. Thanks to all of you.

Also, thanks to our police and law enforcement, firefighters, parents. paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, border patrol, secret service, all first responders. Thanks for what you do to keep us safe. And everyone else out there, you got to take the high ground. And you got to keep the high ground. The tactical high ground on the battlefield. And you, more importantly, have to maintain that moral high ground. And you do that ownership, ownership,

preemptive ownership knowing that there are no excuses and you cannot recover you have to take the moral high ground and you have to keep it and you do that by doing the right thing doing the legal thing and until next time this is Laif and ECHO and Jocko